


trade wind divination of our coastline cartography

by eneiryu



Series: waves on the ocean for the wavering kind [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:07:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28432890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: It’s clear Theo expects you to shoot him.For a long moment, you’re tempted to oblige.
Relationships: Chris Argent & Theo Raeken, Chris Argent/Melissa McCall, Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: waves on the ocean for the wavering kind [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2082588
Comments: 42
Kudos: 114





	trade wind divination of our coastline cartography

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Shesadork](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shesadork/pseuds/Shesadork), who wanted Argent's perspective of _trade the hollow_. And my sincerest thanks to them--I _loved_ writing this.
> 
> As a potential content (and spoiler, if you haven’t read the first part) warning: this story does contain discussion and/or observation of Theo’s struggles with eating because of his phantageusia. Take care of yourselves, folks.

The text comes through when you’re in the middle of something else.

Arguing with Scott, mostly. His optimism is charming but occasionally grating and he’s just so _confident_ that you all will pick Monroe’s trail back up, that you just need to keep looking; to keep peeling back corners; to keep _trying_. You press your thumb to one side of your face, right over your temple, and then your middle finger to your opposite temple, both of them digging in. There’s a tension headache starting at both points because there are _bodies,_ sure, but too many of them, and it’s nearly impossible to tell which might be Monroe’s doing and which might just be coincidence; red herrings; the wild spirit that this part of the country has never really managed to shake, haunted always by the fact that the law came only slowly slouching after the frontier. Too many bodies, and hasn’t that always been your problem? 

Or, more accurately: your family’s problem. _We hunt those that hunt us,_ like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You sigh and drop your hand. 

Checking the text is an action you choose to take because the alternative is to pay closer attention to Scott and Noah and Jordan all running themselves in ragged circles trying to paste together disparate puzzle pieces that you’ve all, collectively, already determined don’t fit. It’s from an unlisted number and that’s not totally unusual—you’re not any more immune to spam than anyone else—but instead of trying to sell you CBD oil or assure you that you’ve won an unexpected fortune, if only you’d click on this innocuous-seeming link, the text is a list of names, and dates, and locations.

It’s a list of causes of _death._

You nearly sit up, immediately and instinctively. At the last moment you don’t, because mixed in with all those things your father had taught you—and later, that _Allison_ had taught you; that you’d taught _yourself_ —is something sharper, something _warier._ It could be the phrasing or it could be the content or it could be _something,_ but you think _don’t let them know,_ and _not yet,_ and then you stay exactly as you’d been before, half-slumped in your current chair.

But later, when Scott volunteers to run to get lunch for not only you all still sequestered in Noah’s office, but for the rest of the deputies at the station as well, you take advantage of the sudden lull in activity—the sudden lull in _attention_ —and you slide into Strauss’ abandoned desk chair out in the body of the station. His computer is showing his desktop because no matter how many times Noah yells at him, Strauss never remembers to lock it, and you take full advantage.

The victims are real, the causes of death accurate. Even more so than some of the more outlandish cases that you and Noah and Scott and Jordan had compiled, they’re banal; typical; _mundane._ If they’d made it onto your list of deaths potentially related to Monroe at all, it’d been for completeness’ sake. But through the internal window into Noah’s office you can _just_ see the map with its old-fashioned pins marking where you all _thought_ Monroe could be, or had been, and when you start plugging in these new deaths it suddenly makes order out of chaos. A pattern locks itself in; you can trace it from one pin to the next, supplemented with quick glances down at your unlocked phone with its text message from an unlisted number. 

You close out of all of your searches of various law enforcement databases. You lock Strauss’ computer as you stand as a gesture of gratitude that Strauss won’t be able to recognize as such.

Later, you drive a few miles outside of town on a purported errand, and you pull out your phone again. Cantrell answers on the second ring. “I need you to trace a number for me,” you say without preamble.

“Hello to you, too,” Cantrell replies dryly, but you can already hear them typing, so you don’t bother responding to the wry dig. They hum slightly, then say, “Okay, give it to me.”

You do.

More clattering of keys, then silence. You resist the urge to demand _well?_ because you know from experience how long the databases they’re searching take to respond. Finally Cantrell recites, “Looks like it was a burner, used only once. Popped up at the following coordinates—” they rattle them off, “—for a period of about two minutes, and then disappears again.”

You squint down at the coordinates you’d copied onto the back of a receipt that you’d found in the cup holder of your SUV. You’ll have to double-check it but you’ve got a pretty good idea where they’re located. _Washington state._ Who the hell do you know in Washington state?

“Thanks,” you tell Cantrell, absent because your mind is firmly somewhere else.

Cantrell hums again. They wonder, “There a reason you didn’t ask your sheriff buddy to run this?”

“Yes,” you admit, and hang up.

\---

“I need to leave for a few days. I have to take care of something,” you tell Scott the next morning.

You’re in the kitchen of Melissa’s new condo. Not _yours_ and Melissa’s new condo, though Melissa tends to refer to it as such, but when she’d tried to put you on the paperwork those few months ago you’d refused. _You need a place that’s just your own,_ you’d told her, even as you’d been signing over your half of the down payment. She’d looked at you like she could look _through_ you to the superstition shortening your breath—your dead father, and your dead sister, and your dead wife, and your dead daughter—and she’d nodded. 

She hadn’t brought it up again.

Scott this early in the morning is bleary-eyed and raucous-haired, and sometimes when he goes to take a sip of his sugar-laden coffee—the only way it’ll actually have any effect on him, though the ritual is almost more of the point, you’re pretty sure—he nearly misses his mouth. You’ve seen Scott fierce and fang-mouthed, his red eyes shining and his wicked claws dripping, and it still marvels you sometimes, the way that both of those versions of himself can exist inside him simultaneously. 

You’ve only ever been an Argent. 

“Oh,” Scott says, blinking. His brow furrows. “Something wrong?”

 _I don’t know yet,_ you think. “No,” you reply. “Just tying up some loose ends.”

Scott’s face blanks some because most of your loose ends are your father’s, and he knows this. He scratches blunt-tipped fingers against the side of his head. “Okay,” he agrees. “Do you, uh. Need any help or anything?”

Your lips flicker. You don’t know why. Maybe it’s the earnestness of the answer. Scott doesn’t even necessarily know what he’d be volunteering for, but it’s you, and he’s Scott, so he’s volunteering. You shake your head.

“Just a few days off,” you demur, and let your voice go just the slightest bit sly. Scott rolls his eyes, immediately rendered exactly his age, a rarity: you asking for a few days off like Scott was your boss, _hilarious._

“Well, let me— _us_ —know if you _do_ end up needing help,” he concludes.

You’re about to reply—something innocuous and ultimately meaningless, something to turn the conversation away like a distraction—when there’s a knock at the door. You frown and look at Scott, and just in time to catch a pinched expression chasing itself across his face. He smooths it out and starts to stand but you pat the air in front of yourself— _I’ve got it_ —and move to answer the door instead.

Liam is on the other side.

His hair is an even bigger disaster than usual—not something you would have considered possible—and there are deep purple bruises underneath his eyes. That his healing hadn’t already erased them means something; Scott’s pinched expression suddenly makes a great deal more sense.

“Hey, Lia—” you start to greet.

“Have you found Monroe yet?” Liam demands, interrupting.

Your eyebrows climb. You glance over your shoulder at Scott, who seems to be in the process of swallowing a sigh. He looks up at you. _I’ve got it,_ he mouths, an echo of your earlier claim, and you nod as Scott stands.

“You want coffee?” Scott asks Liam, a clear invitation to come inside.

“I want to know _where Monroe is,_ ” Liam snaps back, but he shoulders his way past you—you step smoothly back to make room without comment—regardless. You spend a few seconds staring after him, your hand on the door knob. 

You retrieve your coat, and check that your car keys are in the pocket. You close and lock the door behind you when you leave.

\---

You’d been right that the coordinates from Cantrell’s triangulation of the unlisted number lead to Washington state.

The thing is, they lead to _nowhere_ in the middle of Washington state. Out here in the wilder parts of the country the cell towers are spaced farther apart, and so it takes you awhile—a paper map unfolded on the passenger seat of your SUV, the relevant area marked off with a thick black marker—to search through it and find what you’re looking for, even though you have no idea what that might _be._ But, like most things: you know it when you find it. You stand on the side of a utilities access road off the side of some random field, and you toe at the thick plastic shards that are all that remain of what was once a cheap cell phone. Someone, you think, had driven over it, and not by accident.

You look up.

There really is nothing of any note around but that had clearly been the point. Whoever had sent you the text containing all the information you’d needed to pick back up on Monroe’s trail—because that’s exactly what it _had_ contained—hadn’t wanted to be found. You think, for a moment, about respecting their wishes. Quite a boon they’d given you and Scott and his pack and the rest of the supernatural community, after all. 

You glance back down at the shards of plastic that once were a cell phone. You crouch down.

When whoever it was had first driven out here, the ground had clearly been wet, muddy; you pull out your phone and confirm that it had indeed rained in this area the day that they’d sent their text. Since then it’d been dry as the desert, leaving the ground baking in the heat.

It’s left a perfect mold of tire tracks leading away from the ruined phone. You hover your fingers over them, and then pull out your phone again.

You take pictures of the tracks from every conceivable angle. You take close-ups of the tread, then shots from farther away to show the spacing between the wheels. By the time you’re done you have nearly three dozen different pictures. 

Talamantez answers on the _fourth_ ring. “Fucking _what,_ Argent?” They snap. “Interrupting my perfectly lovely day with an _avalanche_ of photos of tire tracks, this some kind of new fetish for you?”

You ignore their tone, and both of their questions. “I need to know what kind of cars might use those tires.”

Talamantez swears filthily. “Oh, well. Let me just plug it into my magical _what kind of cars might use these tires_ machine.”

“Call me back when you have something,” you reply, and hang up on Talamantez’s scathing response.

The nearest town is barely more than a single street with tiny mom-and-pop stores arranged on either side, and the only motel nearby is extended stay and clearly caters to laborers passing through from someplace to someplace else. You get a room anyway, and spend the few hours before Talamantez calls back with the small armory you’d retrieved from the gun locker in your SUV spread out before you, each weapon broken down and cleaned piece by individual piece, then reassembled.

You wipe gun oil off your hands when your phone rings.

“Fucking Toyotas, you happy?” Talamantez spits out. “And tell whoever it is when you find them that they need new tires, their tread is _abominably_ thin.”

You ignore the commentary. “What _kind_ of Toyotas? Sedans? Crossovers? SU—?”

“Trucks,” Talamantez interrupts. “Toyota _trucks,_ based on the width between the wheels.”

You feel something _zing_ down your spine. You nearly demand _are you sure_ before you can stop yourself.

But you do. You do stop yourself.

“Are we done?” Talamantez snaps. “Can I get back to my life now?”

“What life?” You retort, and end the call with a tap of your thumb, right in the middle of Talamantez’s furious exposition about your ancestry.

But your amusement fades fast. The tire tracks near the deliberately destroyed burner phone that _someone_ had used to text you all of the missing information on Monroe that you’d needed belonged to a _Toyota truck._

There are hundreds of thousands of Toyota trucks in the United States. Probably there are thousands just in this area; it seems like the type. But the coincidence _gnaws_ at you, and not in a good way.

You unlock your phone again, and pull up another contact. “Lamahieu,” you greet, when they answer. “I need you to search traffic databases for sightings of Toyota trucks near—” you recite the coordinates. “Call me back when you have the results.”

You hang up, and set your phone aside. Your glock still lies half-assembled. You reach for it.

\---

A tiny coastal town, with a not-so-tiny international port. That’s where Lamahieu’s information leads you. You step out of your SUV into the sea-salt air, and you wonder.

The license plates in the toll camera and street view footage that Lamahieu had found had been different than ones you remember a certain Toyota truck having, but that deters you not at all: of course they wouldn’t be the same. You wind your way through the streets, your eyes searching and searching and searching for every shiny silver Toyota logo; for every hulking truck that roars by.

But you don’t find the truck you’re looking for on any of the town’s streets. 

You find it behind the barbed-wire tipped fences of the _port._ You frown, your arms crossed over your chest as you lean against a building across the way. You squint, like that’s somehow going to change the sight before you as you stare through the links of the fence at the truck just _sitting_ there, hard-hatted and yellow-vested port workers weaving around it and the other laborers’ cars parked around the asphalt.

 _Maybe it’d been abandoned,_ you test out. _Maybe it’d been sold._ All reasonable explanations. The latter would get the former owner some probably _sorely_ needed money, and the former would have avoided exactly the result that’s happened here: someone like you using it to track them down. 

But seconds later you know that neither of those things are true, because _he_ appears in the gap between two other cars, and walks right up to the— _his_ —truck.

You can feel your teeth clench. Your fingers twitch automatically like they want to reach for your gun holstered under your arm.

Ordinarily you’d be worried about him scenting you, but you’re far enough away, and the pollution from the port is bad enough that even if you weren’t deliberately standing downwind, you doubt he’d be able to notice you. But, it’s hard to say: like you, he’d grown up in a world where _survival_ dictated an awareness that bordered on the hyper-vigilant. 

Besides, you’d underestimated him once. You’d vowed, afterwards: _never again._

You sink back into the shadows of the alleyway next to the building you’d been leaning against, and then turn away. You come out the other side and make your way down the street until you can slip into one of the shops alongside it. It’s filled with exhausted port workers ordering sandwiches piled high with meat and cheese, crinkling bags of chips, large paper cups filled with sugary sodas or black coffee. You get into line, and you order the same.

You’re sequestered in a corner of the shop waiting for your meal when his truck rolls by on the street. _North,_ you determine: he’s heading north. 

Your order is called. You retrieve it with a soft _thanks_. 

You eat it folded over your phone, a satellite map of the area and everything _north_ pulled up, your eyes roving, and roving, and roving.

\---

What you find isn’t what you’d been expecting. Finding him working at the port had been strange enough—you’d actually entertained several admittedly absurd explanations where the job would be a cover for some nefarious plot—but tracking him down to a rundown apartment complex is even stranger. You sit in your car sequestered in between one faded salmon-colored minivan and one beat-up white work van, and you stare at the building.

He’d gone inside; you’d seen him. Even _that_ had been something of a miracle, because half— _more_ than half—of the complex’s lights are burned out, the parking lot bathed in these little pockets of shadow and the lobby, such as it is, lit only by the minimal light spilling in from the street. He’d disappeared into the darkness and he hadn’t come back out.

He _doesn’t_ come back out, not for the several hours that you sit there. _He lives here,_ you test out, trying to square it with your memories of him. But it doesn’t fit. He is—he had been?—too vain. Half of the way he’d presented himself when he’d first revealed himself back in Beacon Hills had been a trap, sure, but half of it hadn’t: he’d put bodies in the ground to try and prove that he’d deserved more than he’d been given.

He’d put bodies in the ground to try and prove that he’d deserved more than _this._

You tap your fingers against your steering wheel. You consider. You _plan._

You turn on your engine, and drive away.

\---

The next day, the complex’s landlord squints suspiciously out at you through rheumy, bloodshot eyes for exactly as long as it takes you to pull out two crisp twenties from your wallet, and then his mouth splits in a yellowed, gap-toothed grin. He reaches for the money.

“Yes, yes. Of course,” he chortles, suddenly obsequious. “What was it you’d asked?”

“How long he’s been here,” you repeat.

The landlord makes a big show of pulling up the records on a computer so ancient it _wheezes_ louder than he does. The whole office stinks so strongly of cigarette smoke that you’ve taken to breathing through your mouth to try and stomach it, though in fact you’re grateful: you’d washed your skin and your hair and your clothes with scent-killing soap, but a werewolf isn’t a deer. _And he’s not a werewolf,_ you think, and raise your eyebrows slightly when the landlord shoots you a speculative look.

He sits back. In the reflection of the plastic shelving behind him you can see the computer screen, the results of the landlord’s search clearly displayed. Still, he does a piss-poor job of trying to school his expression into something more serious.

Less avaricious.

“What organization did you say you were from again?” He wonders. “It’s just, there are _laws_ about this kind of thing, and—”

You pull out another twenty. But this time when his eyes light up and he goes to take it, you don’t release it. “How long?” You repeat.

“Last few months,” he immediately replies, recognizing the implicit threat. He gives you the exact date.

You release the bill.

“You want to see his place?” The landlord wonders, his eyes dropping to the pocket from which you’d drawn your wallet.

You consider, but: “No,” you decide. Regardless, you pull out your wallet again, and one final twenty. You hold it up, the landlord’s eyes fixed and following it. “I wasn’t here,” you tell him, then, the hook: “I might be back.”

The landlord’s eyes _gleam._ You can practically _see_ the greed take hold: the potential for future paydays, so long as he doesn’t reveal your presence. He nods.

You give him the bill.

\---

And, of course, you _do_ go back. 

The next morning, to be precise, and after you’ve once more located the truck that’d brought you here in the first place in the port’s parking lot, and watched him exit it. He’d followed several other hard-hatted laborers over to a ship newly arrived in the port absolutely _laden_ with containers, and you’d been satisfied. You’d started your car, and driven back to the rundown apartment complex with the rheumy-eyed, yellow-toothed landlord.

Finding his apartment isn’t hard, because the landlord had _gleefully_ handed over the number as well, even before he’d so helpfully provided an exact timeline of how long that apartment had in fact been occupied by its new tenant. A tenant who’d installed a second _lock_ on the door, you realize quickly. 

_Smart,_ you think, and then you bypass that lock, too.

Inside, you’re even more disquieted. In some corner of your mind you’d been telling yourself that the insides of this new life he seems to have adopted wouldn’t match the outsides: that he’d wrapped a grimy, protective layer around it to hide it, but underneath it would match the person you remember.

It doesn’t.

There’s no furniture in the parts of the apartment that you can see. It’s clear he does his best to keep the place clean, but there’s only a limited amount he can do with the dinginess of the walls, and the carpets, and the corners of the glass of the windows that look out over asphalt and concrete beyond. When you step further inside the apartment you can see down the hallway towards the bedroom, but even _that_ reveals only a bare mattress, and one that’s set directly on the ground and covered in a ragged and mismatched collection of blankets. 

You grit your teeth. You force yourself to move even _further_ inside, determined now to find something to reconcile what your eyes are seeing with what you remember him being. 

But you don’t. But there’s _nothing._ One towel in the bathroom and none in the empty linen closet. A cheap bar of soap by the sink, and a duffel bag tucked into a corner of the bedroom instead of a chest of drawers. There are no pictures on the walls, no random _tchotchkes_ or other detritus that people tend to pick up throughout their lives. Just a bare mattress, on a bare floor, in a bare apartment.

But in the _kitchen._

Two of the four cabinet drawers had been empty, the third had contained a loose collection of plastic silverware that he’d clearly scavenged from restaurants or takeout orders or wherever. But the _fourth._

You pull out the cell phone you find. The battery is missing and so the screen is dark, but you don’t have to turn it on to know: this is the phone he’d had in Beacon Hills, the one that must have contained your saved number, and that had allowed him to contact you.

You replace it in its drawer, exactly as you’d found it.

You open up the fridge, and freeze.

It’s nearly as empty as the rest of the apartment, three-quarters of it filled with nothing but air and _none_ of what is present enough to sustain a supernatural metabolism. You stare a few more seconds, something unsettled twisting in your gut, and then you close the door. You crouch down to open up his cabinets to find a single jar of peanut butter, half empty, and two cans of black beans. All three have a thin layer of dust covering them, and the rest of the cabinet space seems almost _yawning_ in how empty it is.

You sit back on your heels, your mind working. _He’s eating out regularly,_ you theorize, but he’s not: he can’t be. There’s no way he could afford it, based on the available evidence. 

You close the cabinet doors, and stand up, and leave. You make sure to relock _both_ of his locks when you do.

\---

“How go your loose ends?” Scott asks that night, absently and clearly distracted. “Tied up?”

You’re back at the extended stay motel, a small collection of disassembled bullets spread out before you on the floor. Next to them are several strands of purple flowers, sharp-smelling even to your human nose and made all the more so as you grind them up using the mortar and pestle you’d pulled out of the kit you’d brought in from your car. “Getting there,” you answer Scott’s question, and tip some of the ground wolfsbane into the bullet mold before you. “Everything okay back—” you nearly say _home,_ but at the last second manage not to, “—in Beacon Hills?”

“It is!” Scott exclaims, suddenly focused. “Noah got this tip from another sheriff, did he tell you? We were all pretty skeptical but it looks like it might be Monroe after all, we’re driving up to check it out tomorrow. We might have her trail again!”

You let Scott chatter on for a little while longer, the sound of it forming a comforting sort of background noise as you continue to create your wolfsbane bullets, and reassemble them. You hum where appropriate, the tone of them adjusted as needed: encouraging or exclamatory depending on the type of pause Scott gives you. 

“How much longer do you think you’ll be gone?” Scott eventually wonders, good-natured and simply curious. 

While he’d been talking you’d been loading your newly-made wolfsbane bullets into the magazine of your favorite handgun. You slide the magazine home with a definitive _click_ and pull the barrel back to check the chamber.

“Not much longer now,” you answer, and let the barrel slide back home.

\---

He opens his apartment door late the next afternoon, but he doesn’t get the opportunity to close it.

 _You_ don’t give him the opportunity to close it. The second he steps through it you grab him by one shoulder, and haul him the rest of the way inside at the same time that you spin him around and _slam_ him up against the wood. The force you use driving him against the door drives it right back into its frame, shutting it with a _bang_. You drop all your weight against the forearm that you have barred against his shoulders, your feet braced against the ground, and you dig the tip of your gun right up against his side, just below his kidney. At this angle a shot with the wolfsbane bullets your gun contains would enter underneath his ribcage, and tear directly through his other organs right to his—his _sister’s_ —heart. 

He’d be dead in seconds.

“Hey, Theo,” you breathe against his ear, and jam both your arm and gun more firmly into his back.

You expect him to jerk. To snarl with a mouthful of fangs as he lets the shift overtake him, and he tries to throw you off. You shift your feet a little more against the ground, bracing them more completely as you feel his muscles stiffen underneath your hold.

But he _doesn’t_ try to throw you off. When he moves at all it’s just to drop his forehead against the door, the back of his neck bared to the empty air of his apartment.

To _you._

You stare at that vulnerable stretch of skin. In your surprise you recoil, some, your weight lessening across his back, but he doesn’t take advantage. Instead he just stays exactly where he is, his breaths coming short and shallow and causing your forearm—and your gun—to rise and fall rapidly with the force of them. _He’s expecting me to shoot him,_ you realize.

 _He’s planning to let me,_ you think next.

Your fingers tighten around the grip of your gun. Some nights in the bed that you’ve been allowed a place in, in the home that you’d been granted access to, Melissa still wakes up screaming—still wakes up _sobbing_ —with the memory of finding Scott dead in Beacon Hills High School’s library. Less than three weeks ago you’d run into Corey in the middle of downtown, and it’d literally been _running into:_ Corey had been so completely hidden behind the riot of flowers he’d been holding that he hadn’t seen you. _Sorry, Mr. Argent!_ He’d stammered, and so you’d pretended not to know where he was going as he’d scuttled off to go wind his way deep into the Preserve, where he’d place the flowers on the graves that you and Scott and all the others pretended not to know were there, because Corey hadn’t yet been able to bring himself to tell you about them.

Your index finger spasms. If it’d been curled around the trigger of your gun Theo would be dead, but your trigger discipline is better than that, and so instead it curves around the guard. 

Underneath your forearm you can feel his individual vertebrae digging into your skin. On either side of _that_ his ribs are so prominent that you find yourself counting them without conscious desire. 

You hesitate, and then you take a step back. Another. Another. As you step back you extend the arm holding your gun, so that as it unfolds it rises to point from his lower back to the back of his head. You don’t stop retreating until you run out of room, but even still that only gives you a few feet of distance; it’s a small apartment.

Theo doesn’t move right away, and when he does it’s just to turn around. His shoulders scrape against the wood, and never leave it. It leaves your gun pointing between his eyes.

This close, you can see how sunken his cheekbones are. It highlights the bruises under his eyes and turns them into hollows, dark and deep. But he looks at you. You don’t know why it surprises you, but when he looks directly at you, it does.

You look back. 

You dip, after a few seconds, your free hand into your pocket, and pull out your phone. You wiggle it from side to side. “Your information was good,” you tell him. He doesn’t flinch or otherwise pretend not to know what you’re talking about. “The missing pieces we needed, in fact, to pick up Monroe’s trail again.”

Theo says nothing. He _does_ nothing, except look at you. In order to do it he must be staring down the barrel of your gun, still pointed right between his eyes. If you try you can superimpose how he’d looked in the tunnels when he’d been flush with his stolen powers and so determined to steal _more_ over top of how he looks now, but it takes effort. 

You look to your left, towards the empty living area. You look to your right, towards the bedroom with its bare mattress lying atop its bare floor. You look back at him. 

“I can see why you ran,” you say, and let your mouth curl up into a smirk to match the curve of your finger around the guard keeping it from the trigger of your gun. “Living like a king, I see.”

Theo flinches. Just a little. Nearly _invisibly,_ but he does flinch. A muscle in the corner of his jaw jumps the second before he counters, “Better than a cell.”

You study him. “Is it?” You wonder.

You holster your gun.

\---

Less than thirty seconds after you and Theo sit down in a booth at the diner he reluctantly takes you to, a waitress—older, with a lined face but a soft smile already curving her tired lips—brings over a pot of strong black coffee and a single mug.

“Oh!” She exclaims, blinking, when she notices you. “Oh, I’m sorry, he’s never—” She cuts herself off and shoots Theo a look but it’s already too late. Theo manages to chase the wince away from his face before she can see it, and even more so—he dredges up a small smile for her. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, saying it directly to _him_ this time, and when she turns back to you her smile is wider, more forced; customer-service rigid. “I’ll just grab another mug, and a menu.”

Still, she sets her current mug down before Theo, and fills it before she goes. She glances back behind herself as she does, her expression pinched and her mouth pursed. 

More to the point: her eyes are on _your_ face, not Theo’s. You can see her jaw move as she apparently chews the inside of her lip. You ignore her, and keep right on looking at Theo.

“Any recommendations?” You ask, deliberately salting the wound that Theo’s desperately trying to keep from showing, the information he’d had no choice in giving away: that he’s a familiar face around here; that he’s always come in alone; that he’s ordered the same thing, and enough times, to render a menu superfluous.

You can see the exact moment that Theo gives up. He slumps back in his booth seat, and turns his attention to the street beyond the window you’re seated next to. “People seem to like the waffles,” he replies dully.

Your eyes narrow. At first blush it sounds like a deflection—Theo telling you what _people_ order, rather than what he does—but then you recall his empty fridge, and cabinets. 

Your forearm aches with the memory of his spine, and his ribs, digging so prominently into it. Your jaw clenches.

Still, after the waitress returns with two plastic-backed menus—Theo immediately setting his aside—and later returns to take your orders, a chewed-up plastic pen poised over a beat-up spiral notebook, you get the waffles. Just to twist the knife that much more. Theo winces but just _barely,_ and manages to very nearly completely cover it up with the way that he turns towards the waitress, his mouth already opening as he goes to order himself.

“The full breakfast platter,” you interrupt. The waitress and Theo both _jump._ You meet Theo’s eyes—a _dare_ —and continue, “Three eggs, scrambled. Sausage. Hash browns instead of home fries.” You fold your menu back closed with a sharp _snap_ and hold it out to the waitress with a smile.

She takes it, but only hesitantly. She keeps sneaking these little glances at Theo but he’s not looking back, because he’s looking at _you._

Realizing you _know._

“Okay,” the waitress eventually agrees, quiet and still uncertain. She layers her notebook over top of the menu you’d handed her, and tries one last helpless time to catch Theo’s eyes. 

He won’t look back. Her fingers tighten white-knuckled around the menu, and she walks away.

You lean back in your booth seat. You raise your eyebrows as you raise your own mug of strong black coffee to your mouth. You _wait._ Back in Beacon Hills the one thing you could always count on Theo Raeken to do was _talk:_ he’d been better at it than almost anyone you’d known. After Melissa had brought Scott back in the library, after you’d found Scott sitting forlorn and _hopeless_ against one of his bedroom walls a few hours later, you’d crouched down in front of him, and you’d asked: _how?_

And Scott had said: _he convinced them._ Scott had said: _he convinced_ me.

But Theo doesn’t try to convince you of anything. He doesn’t _speak,_ at all.

Instead he just drinks sip after sip of strong black coffee, and each and _every_ time he does, he gags. If you weren’t paying as much attention to him as you are you would entirely miss it, because he does it smoothly enough— _practiced_ enough—that it’s nearly invisible. You tap one finger against the linoleum of the table.

But it’s a different story when your food arrives.

Then he can’t hide it anymore, the apparent richness of the food overwhelming even his ability to maintain the facade. Every few bites—because he _does_ keep forcing himself to take bites—he’ll go pale, pasty, and you can see his whole _body_ jerk; nausea apparently hitting him hard and fast and rolling right up his spine. 

_Stop,_ you almost want to say, time after time. But you force yourself to remember the feel of his spine, and his ribs, digging into your forearm. You say nothing, and watch.

And are watched in turn. Across the diner, sequestered in a corner of the bar, the waitress watches _you._ When she’d first noticed you with Theo she’d been confused, then tentatively pleased, but now all that’s transmuted into _concern._ She keeps sneaking looks at Theo. You can almost _hear_ her internal debate, and see it playing out across her face: that Theo is too young, and too thin, and too _alone,_ and that a responsible adult could be a good thing. But, simultaneously: that maybe there is a _reason_ that Theo is too young, and too thin, and too alone, and maybe you—or someone you represent—is that reason. If she chews any harder on her lip she’s going to bite through it.

 _One more person who’s going to bleed because of you,_ you think as you look at Theo, and you feel your teeth clench hard enough to ache.

“Why’d you send me that information?” You ask, after the waitress has cleared your plates and left nothing between you and Theo but the scuffed table and that yawning, unanswered question.

Theo is still nauseous, you can tell, which is why you can _also_ tell that he considers lying; it shows clear on his face. But: “I don’t know,” he says instead, and it rings true because it rings _bewildered._ _He really_ doesn’t _know,_ you conclude, and find yourself two-fold surprised: that he doesn’t know; that he’d admit it.

Your finger keeps tapping against the edge of the table. You consider. _I could end this,_ you think. You could turn this into a last meal. Pay your bill to the waitress who’d given Theo a soft small smile when she’d first seen him, and lead Theo back out into the dark of the night. You could put him on his knees in the exact same place that he’d texted you all the information that you and Scott and Noah had needed to find Monroe again, and you could _end this._

You could do it because he’d let you. 

You still your finger. You dip your hand below the table—Theo helplessly stiffening across the way, because your gun with its wolfsbane bullets is hidden underneath your jacket, underneath the table—and fish something out of one of your pockets. You bring your hand back up holding a cheap plastic flip phone; that it’s the exact kind of model that he’d used, and destroyed, when he’d texted you is a private joke between you and yourself. You set it on the table between you.

“I can find you again,” you tell him.

His eyes flick up to yours from where they’d fixed on the phone. 

“I _will_ find you again, if you try to run,” you promise him. 

You can see his quick, quick, quick mind working behind his gaunt cheeks, his bruised eyes. “Unless?” He croaks.

You tip your head towards the phone. “You keep that on you at all times,” you reply. “You answer when I call, or text, or email. You help,” you tell him, “find Monroe.”

The threat is implicit. You can see Theo considering it regardless; he shifts his right side, probably subconsciously, like he’s trying to relieve the remembered ache from your gun digging into his back. He’s still pale from his struggle with the meal you’d forced him to eat, and when he touches his tongue to his bottom lip he must taste salt from the sickly sheen of sweat that’d broken out across his skin.

He sits there and he considers the exact same thing that you had: that you could end this. You know because you can see him turning over that fact in his mental hands.

But when he speaks, it’s with a counteroffer. “The others don’t find out,” he bargains, and then he looks up—directly _at_ —you. “Scott, and Stiles, and the Sheriff, and—” there’s a conspicuous silence, only a split-second of it but still _there,_ “—the others, they don’t find out.”

You wonder who’d occupied that silence. You think you might know.

You take your hand, and position it behind the phone. You flick your fingers hard and fast so that it rockets across the smooth table towards Theo. He catches it.

He picks it up.

\---

It’s late when you get back to the McCall condo the next day. You come through the door quietly because Melissa’s coming off a stretch of seven-to-seven night shifts and she’s always exhausted after those. Scott looks up when you do, and breaks into a smile.

“Hey,” he whispers, standing up from the table where he’d been idly scrolling through his phone, which he leaves behind as he rises. “Did you get all your loose ends,” he rolls his hands one over the other, and then pulls them both apart on rising diagonals, the fingers and thumbs of each hand pinched together, “tied up?”

He reaches forward to take one of your bags after, so you hand it to him. He _oofs_ a little in surprise when he catches the weight of your various weapons packed inside; you grin when he looks askance at you and shrug your other bag off your shoulder, and set it carefully down by the door. “For now,” you agree, answering his question. “How have things been,” you wave a hand vaguely around, “here?”

Scott had been in the middle of a narrow-eyed challenge with himself to somehow settle your weapons-filled bag down with as little noise as possible. “Uh, good,” he replies, and finally manages to tuck it right up next to the TV, where it’ll be out of the way but still somewhere you’ll see it and remember to deal with it. 

Still, when he straightens up, there’s a particular gleam in his eye. 

“We have her trail,” he confirms, something _rumbling_ through his voice as he does.

You can’t help responding to it; adrenaline slithers up your spine, reflexive and reactionary. You don’t fight it, just let it spread through your veins and dissipate with the ease of long practice. Instead, you let a wide smile take your mouth, and clap a hand down on Scott’s shoulder.

“Catch me up,” you request, “in the morning?”

Scott nods. You bring your hand on his shoulder up and back down in a second clap, and then head past him down the hallway. 

Melissa stirs when you slide into her bed behind her, tucking yourself up close to her back. “Hey,” she rasps, her voice ripe with a sleepy sort of pleasure as she brings one hand up, and threads it back through the short hair at the side of your head, until she can tighten it around the longer strands at the crown. “You’re home.”

You can’t help pressing up into the touch. You duck your head down after, and press your lips to the curve of her cheek. “Sorry to wake you,” you murmur, instead of agreeing. 

Melissa just shakes her head, and settles back down. Her breathing evens out fast, her hand falling away from your hair. You catch it, and bring it back down to her chest, though once you have it there you leave your own layered over the top of it. You move as close as you can, as close as you dare, your knees tucked up against the back of hers and your chest pressed so closely up to her spine that it digs into your sternum every time she inhales, and retreats when she exhales.

You close your eyes.

But you wake up before morning, instinct prickling away at you. Below and against you, Melissa shakes, and shakes, and shakes, and when you bring a hand up to gently brush a handful of tangled strands of hair away from her face, they come away damp, just like her cheeks. You squeeze your eyes shut and duck your head to press your forehead to her temple, and pull her more completely back against yourself. 

“It’s okay,” you breathe to her, soft and soothing. “He’s okay, Scott’s okay,” because you know what she’s seeing. 

What she’s _reliving._

You drop the hand you’d hand on her face to her back, and press the flat of your palm just underneath her right kidney, exactly where you could have shot and killed her son’s attempted murderer just over twenty-four hours ago, but didn’t. _I’m sorry,_ you confess silently to her, your eyes closed and your head bowed low against the back of her neck like a benediction. Melissa settles after a few more seconds, and returns to an easy, deep sleep.

You don’t.

\---

There hasn’t been a single _trace_ of Monroe or her people in Beacon Hills in months, but you refuse to get complacent.

And you’re not, it appears, the only one.

“Liam?” You query, squinting in the early—the _early_ —morning sunlight across one of the Preserve’s lesser-used parking lots at the disaster-haired figure stood staring out at the town below. 

Liam _jumps_ hard enough that he tangles himself up in his own limbs, and then nearly fells himself a second time as he whips around and his right ankle catches on the toe of his left boot. By the time he’s straightened back up—a flush on his cheeks that you’ll do him the favor of pretending is the rose-tinted dawn—you’ve made it across the parking lot and over to him.

“Argent,” he greets guardedly. “Hey.”

You raise your eyebrows instead of responding. Liam grimaces, and looks away. He jams his hands in his pockets, but hiding them doesn’t stop them from curling into fists; you can see the bulge of them through his jeans. You wait, which is a tactic that Scott is still too young to really have mastered, though he’s learning. Though he’s _trying._

“You’re not going to ask me what I’m doing here?” Liam finally mutters, petulant and a challenge. Also a genuine question, but.

“I know what you’re doing here,” you answer, because you do. Liam flinches.

“Right,” he agrees, his voice as much of a wince as his shoulders. 

You give it another few seconds, just to _see._ Then: “Find anything?” You prompt.

Liam shoots you a dirty look, sure that you’re making fun of him. He also apparently decides to lean into it. “Nothing but a few illegal game hunters and some BHHS students getting a _really_ early start to the day,” he brings up a hand, his thumb and index and middle fingers pinched together, and mimes taking a hit. After, he drops his hand and the pretense. “I don’t even know what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for,” he admits, pissed-off and frustrated and kicking at a loose rock. It goes rocketing off into the distance and then _clangs_ against one of the metal posts marking individual parking spots, and Liam grimaces; the sound sharper in his supernatural ears, undoubtedly.

“Yeah,” you agree. “I understand that it’s not a subject area that the BHHS curriculum typically covers.”

Liam startles, and squints up at you. You keep your face perfectly bland because it amuses you, watching him trying to decipher whether you’re joking or not. Finally you relent, and tip your chin sideways.

“Want some extra credit?” You offer.

Liam blinks. “You—” He starts, then closes his mouth with a _click._ But he _is_ still young, even if in a different way than Scott, and so he can’t help but pick right up less than a few seconds later. “Really?”

In answer, you turn and start walking away, towards the paths that will take you into the Preserve, and through the areas that anyone trying to sneak into town through it would likely have to use. For the first few seconds you don’t hear much of anything behind you, and then: pounding footsteps, hard and fast enough that Liam actually overshoots you, and has to backpedal some to fall into line at your side.

Later, after, you take him to a little bagel shop a little ways outside of town, and pay for his coffee and the massive breakfast sandwich he orders along with your own. He trails you over to one of the tables jammed in close to the shop’s single window, one of the legs wonky and causing him to nearly spill his coffee when he sets it down a little too firmly on the edge. He’s still jittery enough—excited enough—from your recent jaunt through the woods that if caffeine worked on him you’d be worried about him drinking any, but it doesn’t and so you don’t. Instead you jam the toe of your boot underneath the too-short table leg to steady it, and settle in.

The coffee here isn’t nearly so corrosive as the brew that’d been at the diner Theo had taken you to, and Liam doesn’t gag each and every time he swallows a large, gulping mouthful of the stuff. You don’t know why you catch yourself watching his throat for evidence of it, but you do.

Your phone pings in your pocket, rapid-fire: a backlog of messages rolling in now that you’re out of the woods and have service. A handful are from your various contacts. One is from Scott, asking if you’d seen Liam: a game of probably literal telephone going from Mason bewildered and worried by Liam’s absence at the school to Scott to you. _I’ve got him,_ you text back, no explanation, and wonder when that became the way of things: someone always _having_ Liam, like a high-maintenance—or _dangerous_ —pet. 

You set the thought aside, because the _last_ message is from Theo. You scroll through it, your eyes-mind-instincts focused. 

“Who’s that?” Liam asks, breaking into your concentration. You blink and glance up at him.

“Someone,” you answer, and straighten up as you tuck your phone away, “who’s helping us find Monroe.”

Liam’s brow furrows. “One of your hunter contacts?”

Technically, you established your most recent contact with Theo while you were hunting him, so. “Something like that,” you agree. You nod towards Liam’s three-quarters finished sandwich resting lopsided on its wrapper in front of him. “You done with that? If we leave now you can still make the second half of the school day.”

“Joy,” Liam mutters, but stuffs the rest of his sandwich in his mouth in one bite, his cheeks bulging out chipmunk-style. You snort a laugh and stand, the table immediately jolting sideways as you take away your bracing toe.

In the school’s parking lot, Liam spends a few seconds realizing that he doesn’t have any of his books or supplies and then looks entirely stumped by their absence until you roll your eyes, and dig through your center console to find him a pen and wonkily-folded piece of paper detailing your car’s last inspection. You shove both at him, and then flick your fingers palm down in a clear order: _shoo._ Liam grins, seemingly amused as all hell, and clutches them to his chest as he drops down onto his feet.

Still, he stops before closing the door, and slowly turns around. He has his bottom lip folded between his teeth when he does. 

You wait.

“Just, thanks,” he says. “For—” he waves a hand vaguely around and doesn’t specify. 

He also doesn’t stick around to hear your response, just steps back so he can slam the door shut and then trots off towards the school. Lucky, really, because you probably _wouldn’t_ have responded. You watch after him until he disappears into the main building, and then pull your phone back out.

Theo’s found another few suspicious deaths, but even _more_ interestingly: an arrest. You don’t recognize the face from the newspaper article he’d sent you, but his information hasn’t been wrong yet. 

You start your car, and point it towards the sheriff’s station.

\---

The first time you contact Theo and don’t get a response for six, ten, twelve consecutive hours, you get in your car and start driving. At first you don’t let yourself consider the _why_ behind Theo’s silence, but it’s a long trip. Eventually the questions start to filter in, even you with all your training and discipline lulled into a sort of highway hypnosis as you speed your way towards him.

If he’s run, you’ll find him again and put him down for real, this time. For keeps. It doesn’t occur to you until you’re almost to the tiny port-side town in which he’s settled that the next most likely explanation is that he’s dead.

That gives you pause, though you’re not exactly sure what kind.

But if Theo’s dead, it’s somewhere other than his apartment. You’d broken into it again—picking both of his locks like always—but while it’s clear that he isn’t _here,_ it’s equally clear that he had been recently. That he _hadn’t_ cleared it out of his meager personal belongings, most of which he can’t afford to lose because he can’t afford to _replace_ them. You stand over his bare mattress with its ragged collection of blankets for a long moment as you conclude that he probably hadn’t run, and then you about-face for the bedroom door, and the hallway out to the kitchen.

There’s more food in his fridge than there was the first time you were here, and the cans in his cabinets are dust-free. But you grudgingly acknowledge that none of it means anything: Theo knows that you regularly break into his apartment, and he knows how to fake evidence. He knows how to fake a _crime scene._ You tap your fingers against the edge of the fridge door, and consider the very real possibility that _whatever_ it is that’s preventing him from eating regularly, and enough, it’d finally become too much for him to overcome. At the end of the day Theo—just like Scott, and Malia, and Derek, and the rest of the werewolves and the shifters you’ve known—are just as much animal as they are human. 

And animals, when they know they’re dying, tend to crawl off somewhere to just get it over and done with. Especially _lone_ animals. 

You close the fridge door.

But you find Theo, alive, in the second place you look. Or _almost_ the second place. His truck is parked near the port but not behind the barbed wire security fence. Instead it’s a few streets over. Near, you realize, the edge of the pebbled _beach._ Theo looks up as he hears your engine cut off, and grimaces when he spots you hopping down from your SUV. He’s standing by his open driver’s side door and there’s a glazed look to his eye, a little distant.

There’s sea-salt crusted onto his skin, thick enough that you can _see_ it.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, the instant you get close enough. 

His syllables are a mess, rounding where they shouldn’t be and sloping into each other, like he’s forgotten how to speak through a human jaw. Or like he’s _readjusting_ to doing so. You realize now what he must have been doing, because in addition to his slurred speech there are these thick black hairs clinging to his clothes, which he must have pulled back on after shifting back into his human form from his wolf. You look past him, towards where you can just hear the water.

“I lost track of time,” Theo admits, when you don’t say anything, and the thing is: you think that’s probably true, if not exactly in the way he likely thinks it is. You reconstruct: he’d been spending time on the beach, definitely in his wolf-form, and for long enough for the sea-salt to accumulate on his skin. So, he’d probably fallen asleep there. Theo’s too smart to do something like that on accident so he’d done it on purpose, but he hadn’t meant to be out—to _lose track of time_ —for as long as he clearly was, and did. 

His face doesn’t necessarily look any more or less gaunt than it had the last time you’d seen him, a few weeks ago and the third time you’d made this trip, but honestly it’s hard to tell in the dim light. And anyway, the evidence you need is elsewhere: the evidence is that he fell asleep on the beach for longer than he’d intended, longer than he was used to, because his body had been trying to heal itself with rest and _couldn’t._

 _He can’t survive like this,_ you realize. It’s a bloodless thought; clinical. If something didn’t change, one of these days you would try to contact Theo Raeken and he really would be dead. You catch the thought before it can put down roots and start to grow, and box it up very carefully for _later._ For _maybe._ For _if at all._

“Come on,” you say instead. “There’s a Peruvian place I’ve seen on the drive through town that I want to try.”

\---

When Allison was alive, and _Victoria_ was alive, the holidays were a big production. Decorations for every holiday and seasonal foods; the collection of well-worn winter-themed cookie cutters that’d made every move with you, up to and including Beacon Hills. Half the pack would probably faint at the shock of it, but you used to make this absolutely _killer_ sugar cookie recipe, you and Allison spending hours rolling out the dough, cutting them into their shapes; covering them in increasingly obnoxious food-coloring-dyed patterns because it never failed to make Victoria roll her exasperated eyes. For you and Victoria most of it was cover, _blending in,_ but Allison always genuinely seemed to enjoy it. 

For the one holiday season you and Allison had gotten after Victoria, though, neither of your hearts had really been in it. And after Allison, well.

You suspect that Melissa and Scott used to have a similar approach. You base this primarily on the box of holiday decorations that you’d watched Melissa donate during the move from the former McCall house—talk of it being demolished, because the hail of bullets that had ripped through it had compromised the integrity of the bracing beams—to the now McCall condo, and on a half-dozen aborted conversations that you’ve borne witness to, one or the other starting to bring it up before they just—don’t. 

You don’t interfere, or try to get involved. 

But one night Melissa moots the whole hovering issue by coming home from work with exactly one strand of multi-colored lights, and one bottle of tequila. You raise your eyebrows but Melissa and Scott live in a _condo:_ there’s really only one place they can go. You stand from the table and—because you know it’ll make her laugh—sweep your arm out towards the balcony with an over-dramatic flourish. And she _does_ laugh, though it’s a little wet sounding. You trail her out onto the balcony.

She sets the bottle of tequila down and then spends exactly fifteen amusing seconds wrestling with the packaging on the lights before giving up, and handing the box to you. You grin and take it without comment, retrieving your pocket knife and flipping it open so that you can slit through the clear plastic tape holding it closed. Even once you’ve handed the now open box back to Melissa—who takes it with a shiver, because it is admittedly _brisk_ out on the balcony—you keep your knife out, and open, and reach for the tequila bottle instead.

By the time Melissa has finished wending the lights over and through each of the bars of the railing, you’ve cut through the plastic and gaudily-covered stickers covering the cork and are just working the latter out of the bottle. You and Melissa trade again: she takes the now-open bottle, and you take the trailing end of the lights. She disappears back inside while you twist around to plug the strand in; you’d sat down, not necessarily intentionally, in front of the outdoor socket.

Melissa comes back with the bottle and two glasses. They’re not special glasses or anything. They’re literally the same ones you and she and Scott drink water, or milk, or juice out of, because you’re pretty sure Melissa got rid of all of her specialized glassware in the move. She’d been pretty ruthless about downsizing. 

You accept your glass without standing, and more to the point: she folds down next to you.

When Scott gets home later that night three quarters of the bottle is gone, and Melissa is tucked up under your arm, listing against your side. It’s still chilly but neither of you had wanted to move, and besides: alcohol is a vasodilator. You’re both running a little hotter than you usually would be because you are, in fact, both a little drunk.

Possibly more than a little: Melissa grins _wide_ when Scott pokes his head through the balcony door, and gestures him outside. Scott, in quick sequence: spots the bottle, flares his nostrils—noticing the scent only after, because he’s still new in many ways to being a werewolf and some of his stronger senses still come second—and widens his eyes. He laughs, startled and _pleased._

“ _Man,_ ” he says, folding down next to his mom. He picks up the bottle and tips it back and forth so that the remaining alcohol sloshes around inside. “I had no idea I was living with such a pair of _delinquents_.”

Melissa blows an unimpressed—and _wet_ —raspberry, her tongue sticking out. The flash of it gives you all kinds of ideas that you’ll do something about later.

Melissa side-eyes you like she _knows._

On her other side, oblivious, Scott hums a little to himself. “Probably I’m just jealous,” he admits, sighing. He sets the bottle back down.

It takes you a second to realize what he means. He sounds genuinely _wistful,_ and, well. You’re drunk on a balcony with his also-drunk mother, one lone strand of holiday lights casting all your faces in a multi-colored glow. 

Clearly you get it.

“Hey,” you say, reaching over to tap his shoulder with the bottom of your glass. “Go get the thin black case in my blue bag, and one of the beers out of the fridge.”

Scott looks baffled, but he’s also already unfolding himself back to his feet. “Your black case that contains your _wolfsbane flowers?_ ”

Melissa shoots you a curious look as Scott disappears back inside to go do as instructed. You don’t need to say _trust me,_ because she does. Instead you lean forward and press your mouth to hers, and when she drops open her mouth for your seeking tongue, you sweep it inside, and curl it against hers.

“Oh, uh. Sorry,” Scott says, when he comes back. You just pull back, and hold out your hand—your glass set down—for the supplies you requested.

Scott and Melissa both watch curiously as you open the case, and pluck two wolfsbane flowers off of one of the strands tucked away inside. Scott had opened the beer before he’d come back outside so once you’ve done that, you can drop both flowers immediately into the bottle. You swirl it around to get the petals good and wet before handing it back.

Scott makes a considering, thoughtful face. “No kidding?” He queries, but it’s an absent question. Almost rhetorical. 

You treat it as such.

The three of you stay on the balcony until the tequila is gone, and Scott’s finished his beer. Scott gets looser and more languid the more he drinks, until finally—as the three of you are in the kitchen cleaning up, and getting ready for bed—he bumps your shoulder with his, and grins at you when you look over.

“Thanks,” he tells you, because for Scott giving gratitude is like _breathing._ It’s more charming than he probably knows. You let one corner of your lips quirk up, and bump him back. He ducks his head, grinning wider, and fumbles his empty beer bottle under the tap to rinse it out. “Where’d you learn this anyway?” He wonders, wiggling the now-full bottle for a moment before turning it upside-down to dump it out, and put it in the recycling.

“I have had werewolf friends, you know,” you tell him, because you _had._

You don’t tell him that most of them are dead now. Killed by other hunters for breaking the Code and harming an innocent, or so the hunters had claimed. You’ll likely never know one way or another, so you rarely let yourself think about it. You don’t tonight either, just squeeze Scott’s shoulder and then head to join Melissa in bed.

You and Melissa are _hungover_ the next day.

Scott is not. He pops his head into Melissa’s room to check on you both when he doesn’t see you out in the main room by mid-morning, and nearly laughs himself _sick._ But he also cooks up a _perfectly_ greasy breakfast of eggs and bacon and buttered toast, and he brings it in to both of you along with a full pot of strong black coffee that he leaves on Melissa’s nightstand along with two mugs, and a bottle of aspirin.

Neither of you get out of bed until around noon. Even then, Melissa is the first out: she groans and covers her face with her hands, and then declares her need for a shower. You entertain exactly ten seconds of imagining following her inside, but your stomach is still vaguely unsettled and you’re pretty sure she’d kill you, as amusing as she’d likely find it.

Instead you roll over, and retrieve your phone from the nightstand on the side of the bed you usually sleep on.

In addition to the usual cadre of update messages from your various contacts, Theo has sent you a handful of texts. _Who’s Geoffrey Strahl?_ Scott had wondered one day, when he’d caught sight of your phone screen over your shoulder. _Hunter,_ you’d replied, which is true. _Old friend of mine,_ which is not: you and Geoffrey Strahl have and always will hate each other, you suspect, but as a cover, it’s not one that anyone would question. You thumb open the messages bearing his name, and squint at what Theo has sent you.

A handful of leads to check out, an answer to a question that you’d asked. You start tapping out a reply before stopping, your eyes flicking to the date. For a moment you consider giving him a few weeks off, a reprieve for the holidays, but.

You remember his empty bare apartment, and the occasional thousand-yard stare he’ll lapse into when he seems to forget himself.

You finish the message you’d originally meant to send, and then start on a second. You detail a hunch you’ve had for a while now, something you’d meant to run down when you had time. It makes no difference whether Theo can make something of it or not, but it’ll at least put the option out there.

If you tip your head just the slightest bit up, and sideways, you can see just the slightest reflection of the strand of lights wound around the condo’s balcony railing through Melissa’s bedroom window. _Happy Holidays,_ you think as you look at them, and you keep your eyes on them as you tap your phone’s screen to finish sending Theo that second text.

\--- 

Within the first hour of the new year, Liam gets into a fight so bad that the sheriff’s station is called. Luckily for everyone involved the deputy manning dispatch turns around and calls Noah. And because you and Melissa and Noah are all together in Noah’s backyard ringing in the new year as sedately as you can get away with, just the Stilinski’s dilapidated fire pit and a single bottle of whiskey split between you, the deputy sort of indirectly ends up calling all of you, too.

“We,” Noah declares, glancing shrewdly at you and then down at himself, because you’d stood up when he had, “cannot drive ourselves to the station.”

“No, we can’t,” you agree. Melissa rolls her eyes and calls you both an Uber, her fingers still deft on her phone screen even though she’d matched both you and Noah slug for slug. 

“Hey,” she murmurs, as you’re moving to follow Noah out to the front drive to go wait. “Go easy on him?”

You glance down at her, and then bend at the waist to press your lips to her forehead. You don’t answer.

Your Uber driver can’t seem to decide if it’s hilarious or terrifying that they’re driving the sheriff to the station, but sticks scrupulously to just under the speed limit regardless. Noah huffs in exaggerated, tipsy annoyance and slumps against the door of the car’s backseat. You keep your smile small, and quirked, and say nothing.

When you get inside, the deputy managing the station grimaces sympathetically. They say, “The majority of the kids from the party are in the holding cells.”

There’s a conspicuous absence in that report. You can see Noah bite back a sigh. “And Liam?”

“Your office,” the deputy answers. “We needed to, uh—” They don’t finish, but neither you nor Noah had needed them to: that sentence finished _we needed to keep them separated._ Noah groans, and covers his face with his hands.

“I should call his parents,” he concludes, scrubbing his palms down his cheeks. His expression—or the parts of it that you can see anyway—goes dry as he adds, “All three of them.”

He shoots you a sly-eyed look, sharing the joke. You laugh quietly because it’s funny, not because it’s untrue. “Give me a few minutes before you call Scott?” You request.

Noah eyes you curiously, but nods.

Liam has shoved himself into a corner of the couch in Noah’s office, his legs pulled up and his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He glares at you when you step inside the office, and says, “You smell like a bar.”

You grant him the point with an easy raise of your eyebrows, and amble over to Noah’s desk, which you lean against. You don’t sit, even though there’s a perfectly good chair knocking into your knees. Liam’s jaw works and he manages to hold your eyes for about five total seconds, before he makes a rough noise and jerks his head sideways. There’s blood on his knuckles; you can see the reddish-brown starting to flake.

“Taylorson was running his mouth about Devenford’s lacrosse team,” Liam finally grinds out, still without looking at you. “Saying how much shittier they are this year. How easy they are to beat.” 

The line of his mouth twists into something _vicious._ He refocuses on you.

“They’re easy to beat because their captain is dead. Because _Taylorson,_ ” Liam spits out, “helped _murder_ him.”

Talking about it is apparently too much for Liam to handle. He surges to his feet, his red-stained hands swinging as he paces across the length of Noah’s office. The problem is, it’s a small space, and he almost immediately has to turn back. The forced quickness of the circuit seems to frustrate him further. He snarls, and his mouth is full of fangs when he does. His eyes bleed gold.

You don’t move, or blink, or speak.

He rounds on you. “I _know_ it was the Anuk-ite,” he says, in a way that indicates that he doesn’t know that at all. “But I still can’t… I still don’t know _how_ to…” He whips back around, his clawed hands rising to his hair and _clutching._ “Everyone in town who helped her, who tried to…”

He drops his hands, suddenly defeated. This time when he turns back to you, you can recognize the look on his face, because it’s the same one you have to keep off of your _own_ face every time you look at Stiles, who murdered your daughter while possessed by the nogitsune. 

He repeats, “I don’t know how to,” this time as a complete sentence.

You trade places with Scott not long after, who’d _also_ had to Uber to the station, because he’d taken gleeful advantage—permission fully sought and given—to use your trick with the wolfsbane flowers to provide a merry evening for himself and Malia and Derek, Lydia and Stiles back from college with their own sources of new year cheer, and all of them hanging out at the old Hale property, a bonfire that Derek had constructed blazing away in the background of the picture that Scott had sent around to everyone. You’re sitting at Strauss’ desk idly playing Solitaire on the computer that Strauss had once again forgotten to lock when Scott comes back out nearly twenty minutes later, his face drawn and exhausted-looking. He drops down into the seat next to you, which is ordinarily used for criminals or witnesses, depending.

He puts his face in his hands.

“I knew I should have made him and Mason and Corey come hang out with us tonight,” he says, trying for jokey except for the part where he clearly means it. He looks up as Dr. and Mrs. Geyer come through the station doors, finally summoned to come pick up their wayward son. _I’m sorry,_ you see him mouth to them; Jenna gives him a sympathetic smile.

Liam, however, won’t look at Scott at all as he follows sullenly after his parents a few stilted minutes later. Scott’s face falls even further, his eyes squeezing shut.

“I don’t know how to help him,” he admits, half-whispered and like a confession; the station a church and you his confessor.

You study him for a few seconds while he still has his head bowed, and his eyes closed. It’s nearly three in the morning now, that stretch of time when everything seems soft-edged and surreal and smeared in streaks of too-bright light. It’s why you clap him on the shoulder, and tell him, “Well, you’re not going to figure it out tonight.” You make a face, and deliberately correct: “This morning.”

Scott’s lips twitch. He lets you drive him back to the McCall condo.

But while Scott disappears into his room to go sleep, you don’t. Melissa had taken her own Uber back to the condo after you and Noah had left to deal with Liam, and you spend a few seconds watching her in the doorway of her bedroom before heading for the balcony instead. Along the way you snag the bottle of whiskey that Melissa had brought back with her and left in the middle of the dining area table, and consider making a detour into the kitchen to grab a glass before deciding against it.

You spend the rest of the night out on the balcony, the whiskey in the bottle gone multi-colored and festive, as you debate, and debate, and debate. Not long after Monroe had fled town, Liam had told Scott a story that Scott had then told you. More a confession than a story, really: Liam had explained how he’d almost killed Gabe in the high school locker room after Gabe—though Liam hadn’t known for _sure_ at the time—had shot up the McCall house, and nearly killed several people Liam knew, and loved.

 _Why didn’t he?_ You’d asked, curious, and then you’d let your eyebrows climb as Scott had passed along what— _who_ —Liam had claimed had stopped him.

“I’ll be gone another few days,” you tell Scott the next morning, when you’re both back in the kitchen. Scott’s using a different coffee mug but otherwise it could almost be an exact replication of the first time you’d had this conversation. “Another handful of ends came loose.”

“Don’t they always,” Scott mutters, uncharacteristically bitter. He curves his mouth up in a pained smile after, like an apology. 

You clap him on the shoulder, and squeeze—holding for longer than you ordinarily would, and noting as you do the way that Scott shudders out a breath and slumps, some—and then you make your way down to your car. You know exactly where you’re going and even if you _didn’t,_ you’ve never been the type, but still: you pull up the map app on your phone.

You type in the location of that tiny port-side town in Washington, and then throw your phone onto the seat next to you as you start to drive.

\---

“I feel like I’m helping you complete a drug deal,” Liam complains two days later, picking his way across the parking lot of the tiny roadside bar squatting along State Highway 32 towards you, a heavy, leather-backed book held in the crook of one arm. “This place is shady as shit.”

You just let your lips flicker from your place leaned against the hood of your car, and reach out a hand for the book. “You need to get out more.”

Liam makes a face as he hands it over. He continues glowering half-assedly at you even once he has. “Remind me again why _I_ had to be the one to bring this thing to you, out here in the ass-end of _nowhere?_ ”

“Because,” you answer absently— _faux_ absently, really; the book in your hand is a prop even if there’s no way Liam can know that—as you flip open the cover, and start skimming down the table of contents, “ _you_ are the only one with nothing to do for the next week before the spring semester starts.”

Liam makes _another_ face, but doesn’t fight the point, because it’s true. Instead he glances around, his hands tucking themselves into his pockets. “So, is it—what you needed, or whatever?”

Here’s the key moment, the pivot point: “Almost,” you tell him. You jerk your chin back towards the driver’s door of your car. “Get my phone, and pull up the beastiary. Look up what I tell you.”

In spite of himself, Liam’s intrigued. He also has to pass you on his way to do as instructed, and the second he gets within a few feet of you, he stiffens and nearly trips over his own feet. His nostrils _flare_ as he whips around to stare at you, wide-eyed and with his irises starting to fleck with gold.

“Problem?” You wonder mildly, your eyes still on the book in your arms as you flip idly from page to page.

Liam jolts, and shakes himself. “No,” he answers, too quickly. He hurries past you to pull open your car door, and retrieve your phone. “It’s locked,” he declares, his voice agitated but not because your security measures are stymieing him. You twist around so that Liam can hold up your phone to your face, the biometrics kicking in and unlocking it. He brings it back down in front of himself after, and spends a few seconds tapping around.

A few too _long_ seconds tapping around, since it would only take him a moment or two to pull up the beastiary and you haven’t told him what he’s looking for. The way he’s standing, you can see your phone screen in his hands clearly in the reflection of the mirror, and you can see him pulling up your map app’s history.

You can see his mouth moving as he repeats—as he no doubt _memorizes_ —the address he finds. 

You let your eyes fall back to the book in your hands before Liam can look up, and realize you’d been watching. “Jesus, organize your phone, Argent. You’re like an eighty-year-old with this billion screens thing,” he gripes, clearly trying to cover for the delay. “Alright, what am I looking up?”

You give him the name of a creature which, to yours or his or the universe’s credit, really is running around terrorizing a small town; Cantrell had reached out, calling in the chit from when they’d helped you track down Theo’s burner phone. Liam gives a small _ah_ as he apparently finds the entry, and starts rattling it off to you. You flip pages in the book he’d brought you, and ask this question, and that, you and Liam putting the pieces together until you can call Cantrell back—Liam listening in with a tense, stiff set to his shoulders; a hunting dog anxious to get after a scent—and give them the information.

“Can I go now?” Liam demands, once you’ve hung up. “I do have a life beyond being your errand boy.”

You wave him off. “Thanks,” you tell him. 

Liam had already started back towards his car; he flicks an absent wave over his shoulder and answers, “Anytime, except literally not at all!”

You watch him and his rusted-out SUV until the latter disappears from sight, and then you turn and climb back into your own car. Cantrell hadn’t actually asked for your help with the hunt, but you’ll give it to them regardless. You text them to let them know you’re coming, and then, pausing, you pull up the map app on your phone.

In his haste Liam had forgotten to close out of the app’s history screen. You stare down at it for a long few seconds, your thumb tapping at the edge of your phone’s case, and then you slide your thumb up to dismiss, and close, the app.

You drop your phone into the cup holder in front of the SUV’s console, and start the engine.

\---

Melissa comes through the front door of the McCall condo a few weeks later already calling out, “I am _starving._ What do you think about ordering—” but then the rest of her sentence cuts off. You hear the clatter of her keys on the table set by the door, and twist around from your place standing over the stove to see her as she pops her head into the kitchen, her hair mussed and her scrubs wrinkled. 

“Or this,” she says, blinking and inhaling deep as her eyes fall shut. “ _Definitely_ this.” She comes a little deeper into the room, wedging herself in next to you so she can peer down at the simmering pot you’re watching, and then she crouches down to peek into the oven. You obligingly hit the button for the oven light. “Is that garlic bread?”

“It is,” you agree, and nudge her gently sideways so you can open the oven and retrieve said garlic bread with a pot holder, and then set the baking sheet it’s resting on atop the free half of the stove. Melissa leans over it with a gusty inhale as you turn the oven off, her eyes slipping shut again.

“Oh,” she groans, low and satisfied. “Oh, you are—”

But you don’t find out what you are, because she turns and takes your face between her hands, and kisses you, slow and lingering and deep. You return it, your hands falling to her waist. Her breath hitches. She pulls back just slightly.

“Any chance that meat sauce needs to simmer for a little longer?” She wonders, voice low and ripe and melting right down your spine with its implicit suggestion. 

In answer, you grin, and lean over, and turn the heat of the burner down.

When Scott and Liam tumble through the door a little while later, you and Melissa are on the couch, Melissa wearing one of your shirts and a pair of loose cotton shorts, her feet in your lap as you dig your thumbs into the arches of one, and then the other. Your plates sit on the coffee table before you, scraped clean. It takes Scott only a few seconds to notice all this, and then also to use his _nose,_ and then he goes _fire-engine_ red. 

He also stops in the middle of the doorway, causing Liam to run right into his back and sending them both stumbling forward. 

“Oh _hi,_ son,” Melissa greets dryly. “I thought you weren’t going to be home tonight. Date night with Malia, or whatever.”

Scott and Liam manage to detangle themselves from each other, and separate. “Uh, tomorrow,” Scott corrects, his cheeks still pinked. That and his hesitant speech and his awkward posture make him look _hilariously_ young, and you find yourself grinning down at your hands as you continue to work your thumbs up Melissa’s right foot; stopping to dig them into the ball of it as Melissa bites back a pleased groan.

Behind Scott, Liam is doing his best not to look at you without _looking_ like that’s what he’s doing. You’re not a werewolf and you can’t scent his nervousness, but you don’t need to be: he shifts from foot to foot, and the more he tries to keep himself from glancing at you, the more he can’t seem to _stop_ himself; still convinced he’s got a secret he’s keeping from you. But you’re pleasantly full and Melissa is grinning at you, sly, her toes wiggling in your lap, and so you pretend you can’t see it. 

And anyway, Scott rescues him, even if he doesn’t realize that’s what he’s doing. He tips his nose up in the air, his expression going a little hopeful. “Is that, uh. Is that meat sauce?”

Liam perks _right_ up, his nose tipping up in a hilarious echo of Scott’s. Melissa rolls her eyes, and—after raising her eyebrows at you in a silent question, which you answer with a raise of your own—tells him, “Tupperware in the fridge. And bring the bottle of wine out with you when you come back!”

Scott and Liam disappear into the kitchen to go root out the leftovers you’d made. Melissa settles deeper into the couch with a sigh, her feet leaving your lap to mold lightly around your belly. “So much for a quiet night,” she gripes, but there’s no actual heat in it. 

You wrap your fingers around her ankles, and squeeze.

Scott and Liam come back out with plates _heaping_ with pasta and meat sauce and the last of the garlic bread. Scott holds his plate to his chest—getting sauce on his shirt, which he realizes with a swear—so that he can tip the wine bottle he’d brought out over, refilling yours and Melissa’s glances. You thank him and pick yours up, your eyes falling to Liam’s as you take a drink.

He flushes and looks quickly away, stuffing his mouth with a forkful of pasta like that’s somehow going to cover up the gracelessness of his behavior. 

They end up sitting on the floor, the two of them and Melissa engaging in a spirited debate about what to watch as Melissa clicks through the channels. She ends up settling on a game show because Liam catches exactly point five seconds of the puzzle on screen and shouts out the answer, which turns out to be wrong. Still, it turns the next half hour into a barrage of hooting and hollering as Scott and Liam—and Melissa too, occasionally—give up trying to guess the _right_ answers in favor of guessing the most outlandish. 

Liam ends up collapsing sideways into Scott at one point, turtled up with breathless laughter and _shaking_ with it. Scott leans back into him, equally wracked by helpless laughter. Melissa just catches your eyes and _grins_ over the rim of her wine glass.

The show wraps up, and Scott and Liam—still occasionally wiping tears from their eyes as they’re hit with seemingly random bursts of giggles—stand. They gather up both your plates and theirs, Scott pausing to fill yours and Melissa’s glasses one last time with the last of the wine. He gathers up the bottle after that, too, and then leans down to press a kiss to Melissa’s forehead.

“Sorry for interrupting _your_ date night,” he tells her, and then pads into the kitchen with a grin when Melissa waves him languidly off.

There’s clattering and clashing from the kitchen for the next ten or so minutes while Liam and Scott clean up, and then the two of them call their goodbyes as they head right back out of the condo. Melissa twists sideways so that she can rest her chin on the back of the couch, her brow furrowed thoughtfully as she stares at the closed front door. You brace your elbow against the couch back and your head against your palm, and nudge her knee with your own.

“What is it?” You wonder softly.

Melissa turns so that her cheek is laid down against the cushion. “Does he seem better to you? Liam,” she clarifies, when you cock your head slightly.

You hum noncommittally, reaching out with your free hand to trail your fingers down the outside of her bare calf. “Does he seem better to _you?_ ” You ask.

Melissa turns her head back forward so that she’s once more staring at the place where Scott and Liam had disappeared. “Yeah,” she says. “He does.” She sits up and rolls out her shoulders, shaking her arms a little before crossing them over her chest, and settling back down with her back against the couch arm. “Seems less constantly on edge. He’s laughing easier,” she notes, tilting her head down towards where Scott and Liam were sitting and doing exactly that not that long ago. She sighs out a low, gusty breath as she lets her eyes slip shut. “I know Scott’s relieved.”

You search her face. Scott isn’t the only one who looks relieved, you think. You let your lips quirk up, just slightly, and then you lean up and over until you can wedge yourself into the space between the couch back and Melissa’s body. She realizes what you’re trying to do—one of her eyes cracking open—and she shifts to let you, rolling over so that you can put your chest to her back at the same time that you reach up, and pull the blanket folded over the back of the couch over you both. You settle in, your arm around her waist.

“Good,” you tell her, and press a light kiss to her cheek before leaning over, and retrieving the remote from the coffee table.

You spend a half-minute or so clicking through the channels, Melissa below you humming her disinterest or disapproval until you happen upon an educational channel. On screen, a camera crew follows a factory foreperson around as they explain how some random everyday object is made. Melissa stops you here. She doesn’t give you a reason but you don’t need her to; you know she’s come to like watching things be built up, rather than torn down. 

She settles back against you with a satisfied little sigh. You bury your face briefly behind the curve of her ear, and then do the same.

\---

You plaster yourself up against the wall of the grimy warehouse in a rundown district of some nowhere town, fully prepared to follow Rafael’s team inside, but even before your earpiece squawks with a negative, you know they’re not going to find anything. It’s the quality of the silence from inside; the lack of surprised shouts or other noise. Swearing, you rip your earpiece out of your ear just as the lead agent reports, “Negative contacts,” and drag your palms down your face.

Inside, half of Rafael’s agents are milling around while the other half finish clearing the warehouse, because at the end of the day they _are_ professionals, which you can appreciate, even if they know just as well as you do that they aren’t going to find anything. You pick your way over to where Rafael and Jordan are standing; Jordan already has Noah on speakerphone, because it’d been collectively agreed—Stiles at the forefront of everyone’s mind, even if no one actually invoked his name out loud—that Noah would sit this raid out. You brace both hands against a dusty table, and twist your head around to look at the two of them and Noah in absentia, Jordan’s phone screen lit up against the gloom of the dim room.

“What’d we miss?” You ask Theo two days later, the two of you sat at a weatherbeaten picnic table in a park near the port, the wooden beams swollen with the heavy rainstorm that had lashed the town last night and only let up as you were pulling onto Main Street this morning. The only reason your ass _and_ Theo’s isn’t getting soaked is that Theo had wordlessly unzipped his waterproof jacket from his shoulders and spread it out over the bench seat before you both sat down.

Theo peers down at the map and other information you’d handed him, his eyes flick-flick-flicking and his fingers working absently across the surface. “I’m not so sure you _did_ miss something,” he murmurs, his head cocking slightly and his lips moving silently, like he’s repeating a theory to himself. It’s an oddly vulnerable gesture and several months ago you would have thought it looked out of place on his face. Now, you just nudge him lightly in the side, and tip your head down at the gyro resting forgotten by his right elbow.

“Eat that,” you order, but mildly. Theo picks it up without argument and takes another bite, though his eyes never leave the map.

He also gags, though he barely seems to notice. It could be solely his distraction, all of his focus seemingly on the puzzle in front of him, except that he’d stopped trying to hide his reflexive reactions to his choking down the food you force him to eat a while ago. The first time he’d gagged in your presence without running through the handful of strategies you’d noted he’d developed for covering them up—hiding his working throat behind a coffee mug or glass, moving his hands or head in a gesture at the same time to distract whoever might be watching—you’d wondered if maybe he’d just surrendered to the reality of the thing; he knew that you knew, and so there’d be no point in hiding it. 

But you’re not so sure that’s it. It’s not the only vulnerable part of himself that he’s let spill out in your presence, knowingly or not.

“If we didn’t miss something,” you prompt, and with another pointed look at his half-eaten gyro; he takes another obedient bite, gagging once more, “then…?”

Theo—probably in deference to or already irritated by your constant nagging—takes another handful of bites, washing them—and the saliva no doubt reflexively filling his mouth—down with the large cup of coffee you’d brought him. It’s not as caustic as the brew from the diner but it’s Greek, and blisteringly dark because of that fact. He swirls it around his mouth a few times—you can see the distended shape of his cheeks—and then swallows.

“You were too early,” Theo concludes, once he has. He puts a flat palm on the map and shoves it over a little towards you, causing your tablet resting on top of it to shudder and jolt. He trails a finger along a seemingly random stretch on the map. “Her trail is clear but you’re thinking of her like—” he stops, the sudden pause jarring and conspicuous, and his eyes flick to yours like an apology, “—your father.”

He means you’re overestimating her. You nearly have to laugh: what a specifically _Argent_ form of grief, imbuing your father’s murderous protégée with his skills like you could exorcise him twice that way. You shake your head lightly, but it’s not a disagreement.

“So if we cut off her trail by showing up too early,” you say, nodding at the map.

“Here,” Theo says, tapping that same finger at another little nothing town, a blip on the map just like the last one but set at a sharp right angle to it. “She’ll send her people here.” You rove your eyes over the areas surrounding Theo’s fingertip, trying to see what he sees, but you can’t.

You lean back, and pull out your phone. “Rafael,” you greet. “Tell your team to start looking into—” you lean back over, and Theo obligingly moves his finger so that you can see the name of the town underneath. You read it off.

On the other end of the line, there’s a clatter of keys: Rafael plugging in the name, looking it up. There’s a loaded moment of silence. “You’re sure?” He wonders, clearly skeptical.

You look straight at Theo. Theo looks straight back at you.

“I’m sure,” you answer.

\---

A few weeks before his high school graduation, Liam lies to the pack and to his parents—telling his parents he’s with the pack, and the pack that he’s with his parents—and disappears for a weekend.

“Oh, hi, Chris!” Jenna Geyer greets, when you run into her in the produce section of Raley’s. David Geyer looks up and waves with a handful of red onions when he hears.

You wave back, absently calculating how much longer Melissa is likely to be occupied in the deli. “Jenna,” you return warmly, once you’ve concluded that Melissa’s exacting standards for how she wants her prosciutto sliced will buy you at least another minute. “Good to see you.”

Jenna hikes her bag a little further up her shoulder, from where it’d started to slip. You suspect that she’d ordinarily place it in the front of her cart, in the section that folds out to make a seat for a small child if so desired, but there’s a carton of eggs and a loaf of bread already occupying the space that she’s clearly trying not to crush. “Stocking up on provisions for the hungry horde?” Jenna inquires dryly, looking at the basket hanging over your elbow as her lips quirk up to share the joke, her son being one of the hungriest of that horde.

“Something like that,” you agree easily. You nod towards her cart, and then David now weighing potatoes in his hands with the look of someone used to making life-or-death decisions on the regular. Jenna glances back at him, notices this, and rolls her eyes. “Taking advantage of the quiet weekend?”

“Trying to,” Jenna replies. “And actually we better get going—we’re attempting to get through a backlog of errands and we’re supposed to meet the plumber about a leaky faucet soon.”

“Good luck,” you wish her dryly; sympathetically. She grins and starts heading towards David, pushing their loaded cart in front of her, but then she suddenly pivots around on a heel to face you once more. “Hey, when you see Liam, will you tell him I finally found that box of lacrosse stuff he was looking for? It was wedged into a corner of the garage.”

“I’ll let him know,” you assure her, and watch her and David disappear deeper into the store. 

Melissa comes up to your elbow, her wrapped package of prosciutto in her hands, and squints after them. “Was that Jenna and David Geyer?”

“It was,” you answer, and reach over to take the prosciutto to add it to your basket. Melissa surrenders it without issue.

“Liam around somewhere, then?” She wonders, glancing around like Liam might pop up from behind one of the produce stands.

“I’m sure he is,” you agree, because Liam is most definitely _somewhere,_ though that somewhere is, if you’re correct, not Beacon Hills. You nudge her lightly. “What else do we need?”

Melissa abandons her visual search for Liam to pull out her phone, and glance at the list she’d created. She rattles off the remaining items you have left to get.

You make sure to linger at various spots, until you think enough time has passed that the Geyers will be checked out, and out of the store.

That Monday night, you’re at a gas station filling up when you hear the familiar asthmatic wheeze of a certain engine. You look up to see Liam pull into a spot a few pumps away from you, having clearly not caught sight of you yet. But then he hops down out of his driver’s seat, and does.

His expression spasms, _anxiety_ flying free and fast across it for a moment, but then it hardens. He reaches back, and slams his door shut, and starts making his way over to you. Intrigued, you shake the gas pump in your hands a few times—your tank had finished filling—and then twist to put it back in its slot. Liam has reached you by the time you turn back around to replace your gas cap.

“Argent,” he greets warily.

“Liam,” you greet, in the same tone. Liam makes a face, recognizing that you’re making fun of him. He rolls his eyes in an almost exact replica of his mother.

Speaking of his mother, apparently: “My mom said she ran into you this weekend at the store, when you and Ms. McCall were picking up stuff for me and the pack,” Liam informs you.

“Did she,” you reply, easy and meaningless.

The line of Liam’s mouth thins. “You covered for me.”

You don’t agree, or disagree, but you do tell Liam: “You might want to work on your subterfuge. This last plan of yours had too many variables you couldn’t control.”

Liam doesn’t seem appreciative of this constructive criticism. He just keeps watching you. “ _Why_ did you cover for me?”

You just smile. “I’m supposed to meet Scott and Noah and Rafael at the station to go over our latest intelligence. I’ll see you later, Liam.”

You turn for your car door, one hand already reaching for the handle to pull it open. “Argent!” Liam calls.

You twist your head around on your neck to look back at him over your shoulder. His jaw clenches. The muscles at the base of his throat jump.

“Why haven’t you told Scott?” He presses.

There are a lot of things he could be referring to you not telling Scott. About Theo, about Liam. About Theo _and_ Liam. You don’t know which one he specifically means, or if he means more than one, but in any case:

“Why haven’t you?” You throw back, and smirk when Liam’s only response is to lapse into a stunned silence, his expression going slack. 

You finish climbing into your car, and leave him there as you drive away.

\--- 

But the interaction—the _confrontation_ —makes you curious. _Something’s happened,_ you realize, with all the certainty of gospel. You change lanes so that you can change directions, texting Scott and Noah and Rafael one-handed to let them know you won’t be coming. Melissa answers on the third ring.

“Hey,” she says, a little breathless because she almost undoubtedly just finished jogging her way over to an unoccupied corner of the hospital, her phone secreted away by her turned-away ear. “What’s up?”

“I won’t be back tonight,” you tell her.

“Okay,” she acknowledges, without asking for an explanation. Then, her only—her usual—request: “Be safe?”

For some reason this time it hits you like a bullet between the ribs, and you have to bring your phone over to press it _hard_ against your forehead. Your eyes squeeze shut. You give yourself two quick breaths like that and no more, because any longer and Melissa will start to wonder. You bring your phone back to your mouth.

“Always,” you tell her, which is one of those lies that people like you tell people like her; the kind that both parties know is a lie, and know that the _other_ knows is a lie, but has power, and meaning, nonetheless. 

You hang up.

It’s early morning when you get to the port-side town, because it’d been early evening when you’d left. There’s something to the fact that this drive always takes you exactly twelve hours away, where the reality of the world is flipped perfectly over like a reflection. A mirror-universe. You head straight for Theo’s rundown apartment because you’ll either find him there, or you won’t, and you can settle in to wait. But Theo _is_ there, and squinting curiously at you when he pulls open his door.

“Something happen?” He wonders, because he knows how to calculate time from distance divided by rate; he knows you must have driven all night. 

_You tell me,_ you almost want to reply, but instead you say, “Let’s go to the diner.” Theo’s brow furrows so you smirk and say, “I like the coffee,” which is, strictly speaking, true. Much like Theo you don’t like it for its taste, but for other reasons, subtler reasons; for what it had and continues to reveal, like the paint-stripping strength to it is more than just physical.

For Theo’s working throat as he drinks it, and the gagging he’s never managed to fully hide.

His throat still works the same as he sips it now in a booth across from you, the practiced gag of his reaction to it unchanged. So he and Liam _hadn’t_ found a way to cure whatever still roils his guts, and coats the inside of his mouth, making it nearly impossible for him to eat with any degree of comfort. You discard that theory, but it just makes you _more_ curious.

Still, you have to table it, at least momentarily: your waitress— _the_ waitress, with the soft small smile that she always gives Theo—appears. She looks expectantly at you, her pencil poised over her notebook. You nearly order for both him and you but at the last moment, instinct sparks up your spine. You order the waffles—a running joke, now, between you and Theo, even if neither of you would label it that way aloud—but then stop, leaning back in your booth seat and raising your eyebrows pointedly over the rim of your coffee mug when Theo startles at the sudden unexpected silence and looks at you. His mouth drops open. 

“Eggs,” he manages, when the seconds have dragged on for very nearly too long for the situation to recover from. “Toast.” Bland foods. The kind that someone recovering from an injury might pick to walk that thin line between sustenance and exacerbating a body already wounded. Something spasms across Theo’s face after he speaks but he manages to pull up a smile for the waitress and she turns away, and the look she shoots you as she walks away is, for the first time in your lopsided acquaintance, more speculative than suspicious.

Your eyes don’t leave Theo’s, though. That something that’d spasmed across his face: it has a name, and you think you know what it is. Theo sees you seeing it and his eyes narrow, he searches your face. 

In that instant he looks more like _you_ —old and weathered and soul-weary—than he does the other near twenty-somethings scattered throughout the diner, giggling over their phones and flirting lightly with each other, and the world. You remember thinking, staring down at the file that you and Noah had pulled together on him during those black days chasing after the Beast, that nine had seemed _abominably_ young to be pulled into this life. You’d thought of Allison as she’d been at nine, and you’d had to turn away for a moment, because some part of you had already been sure that you were going to have to kill Theo Raeken, since Scott would never be able to bring himself to do it, and it’d been more a struggle than it should have been to resign yourself to that reality. That Kira had spared you the necessity had seemed like some kind of boon, after the fact.

You wonder if Theo sees something spasm across _your_ face as you think all this. It’d only be fair, but then again: life isn’t.

“Why’d you tell Liam where I was?” Theo finally asks _._

It’s the second time in twenty-four hours that someone has asked you for an explanation for this pocket universe you’ve created; out of space and time. You consider. You could deflect, avoid, distract, just like you had with Liam. You could simply tell Theo _no_ and he’d accept it as just one more thing he wasn’t allowed; he’d make his peace with it. But as you swirl your coffee around your mug your eyes flick over his face, his chest, his arms. He’s nowhere near as muscular as he had been when you’d known two things about him simultaneously—that he’d been nine when he’d been dragged into this life, and that you were going to have to kill him—but he no longer looks like a premonition of his own corpse. 

Liam’s shoulders when he’d asked you essentially the same question as Theo, if in a different way, had been straight and strong and _steady._ He hadn’t wavered. He hadn’t _raged._

You set your mug down with a click on the table, both because it’s empty and because you like the performative nature of the action; appropriately dramatic. A ringing bit of finality, _punctuation._

“For his sake as much as yours,” you tell him, but also, for the first time since all this started:

You tell yourself.

\---

Scott’s agitated voicemail makes a whole lot more sense to you once you blow through the doors of the FBI field office in Redding—the agent manning the security desk surging to their feet on reflex as you do, and then immediately slumping back down, well-used to your usually-benign disregard by now—and rush your way into the conference room down the maze of hallways, the entire back wall taken up by high-definition screens. The whole huddled mass of Scott and Rafael and Noah and Jordan and Rafael’s team jerk around to look at you, but almost immediately turn back once they register you as something other than a threat.

Their eyes are glued to the screens, and Monroe moving confidentially around from one to the next.

She moves like your father, now, the adopted slope of her shoulders immediately recognizable. You wonder if learning how to was deliberate or accidental on her part; imitation the sincerest form of flattery, even between murderous sociopaths. It seems to work, anyway, just like it had with your father: her people straighten up when she comes into rooms. They angle their bodies towards hers and dip their heads just slightly down, obsequious. 

Your teeth grit. Scott’s jaw, when he looks over you, is equally tense. His eyes are bleeding red, though he probably doesn’t know it, and his nostrils are flaring wide: evolutionary markers that trace back to the prehistoric preparing his body for the hunt. 

You nod shortly to him, and he nods back; a pact sealed.

It takes you all two days to come up with a plan designed to minimize casualties—to Rafael’s team, and the pack, not Monroe and her people—all while Rafael and you plant backup all around the warehouse; FBI agents and code-loyal hunters instructed that Monroe and her lieutenants were _not to get away,_ should they try before the full assault was ready. You sleep because you have to and you make _Scott_ sleep because he needs to, his youth showing through the cracks of his _true alpha_ mantle as he jitters and paces and strains at the proverbial leash to go _now, now, now._

He reminds you of you, when you were your father’s to point and shoot, and it’s not a comfortable comparison. _Mistakes of our youth,_ you think, and weren’t they legion.

You’re not the only person you see in your mind’s eye, when you think that.

But finally you all are as ready as you can be. You disperse back to your various homes for one last night before the planned raid; you and Noah and Scott and Jordan had all been staying in hotel rooms in Redding for the duration of the planning, but the risks you face aren’t _zero._ Back in Beacon Hills you and Scott return to the McCall condo, and even you have to keep breathing through the random tightening of your gut, little bursts of adrenaline exploding throughout your nervous system as you keep catching sight of clocks and phone screens and the _time_ and thinking _twelve hours to go._

Eleven. Ten.

Eventually Melissa takes Scott’s face between her hands and tips his head down so she can press a kiss to his forehead. “Go,” she orders him, soft but no less firm for it. He stares at her, taken aback, but then nods. He snags his jacket and closes the door nearly silently after himself when he leaves, off to find Malia and an outlet for his impatience. 

For the _anticipation_ that neither of you will call bloodlust, though it’s there in the chips of red that won’t stop flecking his irises.

Once he’s gone, Melissa turns to look at you. She cocks her head slightly to one side. “You want to pretend you’re doing any better?” She wonders.

Your lips twitch. “No.”

She takes you to bed.

You pass as many hours as you can get away with dragging your mouth over her slick skin, one hand wound carefully but _tightly_ in her hair, her legs locked around your waist. Neither of you are as young as you used to be but that just takes the urgency out of it; neither of you with anything left to prove, except that you want to be exactly where you are.

And then the sun rises, and so do you.

“Hey,” Melissa rasps as you finish dressing, and prepare to leave. She’s still tangled naked in the sheets, her eyes sleep-hooded but sharp on your face. “Be safe,” she says, and then her eyes harden. “And help everyone _else_ be safe, too.”

You nod.

But the raid is almost anticlimactic in its execution. Monroe and her people have the fervency of true belief on their sides but Rafael’s agents and the code-loyal hunters you pull together have _experience,_ and there’s only so long that the former can bear up under the latter without giving way. Rafael’s agents lead the way and the rest of you spill in afterwards, mopping up the surprised survivors with lethal or non-lethal force, depending on the type you’re confronted with. 

And you? As ferocious as the fighting is, the outcome isn’t in doubt. You leave Scott and Malia and Jordan and Derek focused on protecting, alternatively, themselves, each other, and your human FBI and hunter allies, and you sweep your way through the warehouse, your eyes searching for only one figure in the dozens that you overwhelm.

You find her in a hallway, in offshoot of the main room where the majority of the initial frenzy of fighting had taken place, and where, apparently, she’d been shot; there’s blood streaking the walls leading up to where she’d collapsed, and more of it spilling out in a puddle from where she’s sat, now half-propped up against the beige-painted bricks. The mass of blood and fabric marking her stomach, her hands pressed uselessly down over it, is obviously an exit wound; she’d been shot in the back. You wonder if it was one of Rafael’s people or one of yours or one of _hers;_ friendly fire, for certain definitions of the word _friendly._

You look at the wound, and realize with the benefit of long experience that she could survive it, if she received medical treatment quickly. 

You lift your hand to your earpiece, and mute the built-in microphone. 

It means no one but you can hear it—hear _her_ —as Monroe starts to _laugh,_ choked and wet, having apparently realized what you’d done. More blood spills from her mouth to coat her chin, and when she grins at you—more of a baring of teeth—her teeth are painted red with it. 

“Still having to protect your precious true alpha from getting his hands dirty,” she observes, her speech hitching at multiple points all the way through. Her smile becomes even more feral. “That’s why he’s going to _lose._ ”

“No,” you counter. “That’s why he’s _won._ ”

Noise down the hallway maybe ten minutes later just as someone starts shouting your name in your earpiece, and then Scott appears. He spots you and you can see the relief on his face, but almost immediately his eyes drop down. His expression spasms, and goes _hard_. He approaches you, and _her,_ slowly.

He stops at your side, and looks down at Monroe’s death-slack face. 

“So,” he says finally, and glances up at you.

“So,” you agree.

You raise your hand to your earpiece, and reactivate the microphone.

“I have eyes on Monroe,” you report. “She’s down. I repeat, she’s down.”

\---

It takes Rafael exactly two forms, and three total paragraphs, to officially document Monroe’s death to the government’s satisfaction. The last form has an option to upload related materials; the bulk of his time is spent searching through his hard drive selecting one crime scene report after another, until all of the files on Monroe’s and her band’s confirmed or suspected victims are attached. 

“You can’t be serious,” Scott says, when Rafael sits back in his chair, and pushes back away from the desk he’s been borrowing in Redding’s FBI field office. “That’s _it?_ ”

He sounds baffedly indignant, like the bloodlessness of bureaucracy in the face of all the calamity and damage to the last year of his life is some kind of calculated personal insult. Rafael gives him an apologetic smile, the curve of it a little pained, and confirms, “That’s it.”

Scott looks at you next, a little imploring though he probably doesn’t realize it, like you might be able to countermand Rafael’s claim. Instead you push yourself to your feet and clap Scott on the shoulder. “C’mon,” you encourage.

Out in the conference room where a few short days ago you all had been staring at the surveillance footage following every move of Monroe’s, Rafael’s agents and your code-loyal hunters are already several beers deep in the various six packs that they had brought for exactly this purpose, bottle caps strewn across the massive table where earlier there had been crime scene reports; autopsy files; the mad, frustrated doodles of people sick to death of looking at the same information for too long, and seeing nothing. Scott’s threatening black mood breaks with a sort of gleeful surprise, his eyes darting around like he’s wondering if maybe the agents are going to have to arrest themselves for drinking on the job. One of them solves this dilemma for him by slapping him on the back, and shoving a bottle of beer into his hand.

Scott glances at you first, Noah second, and his father third, but he has the good sense to take the bottle. It’s theater in more ways than one but it’s the kind of theater that _matters,_ and Scott’s getting better and better at recognizing the latter, and giving in to them. He lets the agent who’d handed him the beer drag him over to a group of hunters and agents all bullshitting and laughing at one end of the table, and for the next half hour he pretends to get progressively drunker on alcohol that his body clears the second it hits his system.

In a different corner of the room, the Calaveras and Thurows are recruiting, their heads bent low with a selection of handpicked agents that, if you were still in that game, you would have chosen as well. You leave them to it. 

But after a while Scott starts to get jittery, rather than laconic. “Hey,” Noah says to you, as you and Scott are making your excuses and preparing to head back to Beacon Hills. “Let me spare you and Melissa the inevitable insanity of trying to _pack—_ ” he puts a deliberate amount of emphasis on that last word, specifically for the way he knows it’ll make your lips twitch at the hidden joke, “—all our various friends into your condo.”

 _Melissa’s condo,_ you nearly correct him, superstition jolting through you, but instead you nod and tell him, “Thanks.”

It’s a good call. The weather is sticky and humid-hot with the summer air, and when you and Scott step out of your SUV in the Stilinski driveway, Stiles literally tackles Scott back so hard— _whooping_ a triumphant, celebratory cry—that Scott trips over his own feet and goes sprawling back in the Stilinski front yard, laughing all the while. Stiles lands on top of him and doesn’t move to let him up, just takes Scott’s face between his hands and squishes his lips into a fish-mouthed shape.

“You did it, Scotty!” He crows. There are neighbors looking out their windows, or peering out of their cars at the commotion, but honestly: this is hardly the first time something similar has happened. You leave the two of them wrestling like the boys they no longer are in the grass, and head around to the back.

Derek’s already there, and wetting down the grass around the fire pit with the hose. “I figured,” he starts to explain, and gestures towards it. 

You nod and, without a word, spare him the necessity of actually starting the fire. It seems the least you can do, even if there’s less than _nothing_ you can do about the pinched look he gets on his face as the flame starts to crackle; his family is already long-dead, after all, as is your sister.

The pack arrives in drivels as the news spreads that you’re back. Scott gets tackled into the ground twice more. Once by Liam, who you don’t think necessarily _intends_ to topple Scott like a tree, and once by Corey and Mason, who definitely do, because it’s only seconds after Liam clambers clumsily off of Scott, giving them the opportunity. Scott just laughs and squeezes them all close, though Liam he hangs onto for an extra-long second, his temple pressed to Liam’s and his lips moving as he murmurs something directly into Liam’s ear. 

Liam nods shakily, after whatever he says, and spends a moment with his forehead pressed _hard_ to Scott’s shoulder.

Melissa arrives still in her scrubs, her hair a tangled mess that’s trying valiantly to escape from the elastic band she’d used to tie it back, away from her face. You take its side and free it when she comes to stand next to you, sliding your hand back into the mass of it and gently tugging the tie loose until it spills down around her shoulders. She still squints one eye closed at the gentle pull and laughs at you, though she stays where she is and lets you calmly and methodically comb your fingers back through her thick hair, until you can wind those same fingers within it without issue, and tug her mouth to yours.

“Everybody safe?” She wonders against your lips.

“As we can make them,” you agree, and kiss her again.

You wake up the next morning in the Stilinski house guest bedroom, Melissa curled into the curve of your body and your head the sort of fuzzy that it only gets when you’ve managed the kind of deep, restful sleep that’d become more and more rare for you the last few years. You bury your face in the back of Melissa’s neck for a moment, and then—long-established habit kicking in—roll over to retrieve your phone from the nightstand.

You pause with it already held up over your face, blinking, because you remember that Monroe is dead. You have a handful of messages—mostly drunken congratulations from the agents and hunters who’d kept celebrating a job well-done long after you and Scott and Noah had left—and exactly one message from an unknown number. That one you pause over but it really _is_ spam, so after a moment you delete it, and then roll to your feet. 

Melissa makes a sleepy, inquiring hum behind you. You bend back over her to press your lips to your cheek. “I’ll be back tomorrow night,” you tell her.

The rest of the pack is spread out in various spots around the Stilinski living room. You pause as your gaze lands on Liam—on his sleep-slack face and the complete lack of bruises underneath his eyes—and then you squeeze your jacket in your hand a little tighter, and keep heading outside, to your car.

\---

Halfway to the tiny port-side town, you stop at a gas station and pick up a six pack of local beer along with your tank of gas. Three-quarters of the way there, you pull off onto a scenic lookout that’s no more than a row of empty parking spaces, a line of metal railings bolted to concrete pylons, and a single, sun-bleached plaque bearing witness to the stretched-out vista. You slam your car door shut and go to stand at the very edge, the railings pressing into your thighs, and you look out and try to see if you can find the horizon; the place where the earth starts curving back into itself. 

A few months ago Theo had accused you in the gentlest way possible of keeping your father’s ghost alive by seeing him in everything Monroe did and was. He’d been right, of course, but twenty-four hours out from Monroe’s death, away from the heady triumph of seeing the collective shoulders of the pack finally slump with relief, you can deconstruct the cramped feeling in your chest and recognize that as long as Monroe had lived, you’d convinced yourself that some part of your family did too, even if it was the worst parts. Now it’s just you, alone. Now it’s just you, here on this scenic outlook with its thousand-foot drop, and the enormity of that thought is all-encompassing, filling the valley in front of you from one white-capped peak to the next.

You get back in your car.

Back in Theo’s apartment, which you break into once again, you sit against the wall in his empty dining area because his apartment is as bare as ever, and you make it through one beer in its entirety and are working on a second when Theo returns from work. That he doesn’t scent you and never has the times before remains a mystery, but one that’s lost its urgency. Mostly now you’re just curious, know that you’ll never ask, and have resigned yourself to likely never finding out. It feels, oddly, like some kind of payment you’re rendering Theo for his help the past three-quarters of a year, a bonus on top of the fact that he only has his life because you’ve allowed him to keep it. 

He looks tired when he sees you, and startled, and very young. He stays frozen in the doorway for a few seconds and you can see him working to put all the pieces together, probably not even intentionally because he was nine when he was dragged into this life, and you know from experience: something you start doing when you’re that young, it seeps into your bones and rewrites your DNA. It becomes who you are even when you swear to yourself it doesn’t. 

Still, when he finally closes the door and picks his way towards you—approaching wild-animal slow—and folds down a few feet away from you, far enough away that he’d have time to react if you lunged, or moved, or did something else unexpected, you roll your head sideways and tell him, “Monroe is dead.”

He blinks. His mouth drops open, soft and surprised. He’s murdered people and helped bring about the murders of others, but in that instant he just looks like anyone else would when confronted with an unexpected revelation. Probably you shouldn’t find it funny but you do, the laugh escaping you on these little bursts of air, half of them whistling through your beer bottle because you’d already started raising it to your lips to take another drink. You look away from him.

Out of the corner of your eye you can see him trying to decide how to respond, because his mouth literally opens and closes a few times. But Theo Raeken is Theo Raeken, and eventually he figures out exactly the right thing to say.

He says nothing.

Instead, after a moment’s hesitation, he puts his palms flat on the dingy carpet and scoots himself backwards, until he can put his back to the wall that runs perpendicular to the one already holding you up. He doesn’t stretch his legs out like you had, but leaves them folded up against his chest, his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling down between them. He looks at you for a long second, and then tips his head back, and closes his eyes. 

It gives you the opportunity to look at _him,_ though granted you’d do it—you _have_ done it—even if his eyes were open. Three-quarters of a year ago he’d texted you all the information that you’d needed to reorient the hunt for Monroe, to put it back on its tracks, and you still have no idea why he did it. 

You suspect that he doesn’t either.

It’s why you stretch out a foot, and tap it against the side of his. It takes him a moment to blink his eyes open, and tilt his head down so he can look a question at you, silently curious. 

“Want to see a trick?” You ask him, but don’t actually wait for him to accede, or not. 

You retrieve another beer from the six pack at your hip, and pop it open with the edge of one of your keys. It’s dark enough in the apartment—neither of you had bothered to turn on any lights, and the street- and moonlight in the apartment is anemic at best, the full moon weeks away—that the wolfsbane flowers in the black case that you pull from your pocket look ink-colored, instead of purple, but still: Theo startles when he scents them. You note that his sense of smell seems to have returned to him but it’s a toothless thought, filed away and forgotten about as you pluck two flowers from one of the stems, and drop them into the beer you’d opened. 

You hold it out.

You can see the calculation in Theo’s eyes. What an assassination attempt this would be, if this were that: what a long game you would have been playing. Those thoughts play out on Theo’s face and you’re honestly not sure if he ends up accepting the bottle because he’d decided that possibility is absurd, or because he’d decided he doesn’t care. 

Part of you thinks it might be a little of both.

He drinks the wolfsbane-laced beer. He gets looser, and more languid, and seems surprised by both of those things. _Of course,_ you realize: he’s never been drunk before, young as he was when he was—

You nearly think _bitten_ , before you remember that he wasn’t. _Made,_ you correct, even in the privacy of your own head. You finish off your third beer, which you’d been drinking in slow steady sips in parallel to his, and prepare him a second. He sets the empty bottle of his first beer down by his hip, and accepts the new. He’s a little unsteady as he does it so you hold onto the bottle for an extra-long second, until you’re sure his grip is tight enough. 

There’s one bottle left in the six pack. You slide it free of the cardboard holder and pop its top, and take a drink.

Even when you finish it, you don’t move. Theo’s apartment isn’t exactly _quiet_ —thin walls, and there are other tenants, other _people,_ moving around and living their lives both inside and outside of the building—but it’s all background noise, but for the deliberate _clink_ of Theo arranging his two beer bottles by his side, overly conscientious the way only benignly drunk people can be. This close you can hear his breathing, occasionally hitching as he hauls his slumping body back up against the wall, and it’s such an incongruous moment. Three-quarters of a year ago you were ready to kill him in this room. 

“The phone I gave you,” you find yourself saying. Theo blinks at you, soft-eyed and slow. “Give it to me.”

It takes a moment for the instruction to penetrate his drink-fogged brain, and an even longer moment for him to wrestle the cheap flip-phone out of his pocket. He knocks over both of his empty beer bottles when he does, this absurd little flash of panic as they clank and fall, and so he isn’t looking at you as you quickly pop the back off of the phone, and pull out the battery and then the SIM card; he’s looking at the bottles, trying to stand them back up.

But he jerks and looks around when he hears the thin plastic card snap. His eyes flick from one half of the now-broken SIM to the other, and then up to meet yours. You smirk. 

You drop one half of the broken SIM into one of your empty beer bottles, replaced neatly in the cardboard carrier they’d come in, and drop the other half in a different bottle. You pick the phone back up—the battery and back reassembled—and toss it to him. He nearly fumbles the catch, drink or surprise or both or something else making his fingers clumsy.

You climb easily to your feet. 

Theo just watches, the phone still held cupped in his hands in front of his chest, almost like prayer. His eyes are wide on your face and his jaw is slack. You wonder what he’ll do next, if he’ll stay in this place with its quiet muted rhythms, or if he’ll go somewhere else, try to _be_ someone else. 

But both of the halves of the SIM card of the phone you’d be using to track him are drowning in the dregs of the beers you’d drank, side by side with him, so you’ll likely never know. You reach up with one finger and touch it to the very tip of your nose, and then you do the same with your other hand. Theo’s eyes follow the movements, but they’re the only part of him that moves.

You walk a tightrope line over to the six pack, and are satisfied when you don’t stumble, or even wobble. You could hunt something in this state if you needed to, but you don’t. You pick up the container, and straighten up. You retrieve your keys from your pocket.

Theo is still looking at you, still sat on the ground with his hands cupped before him holding the phone now rendered useless inside them. “Goodbye, Theo,” you tell him. 

You shut his door very quietly when you leave.

\---

A few months into the fall semester—Scott at UC Davis, _finally,_ Liam and Corey and Mason at UCLA and Stiles and Lydia back on the east coast—you’re down south, near the border, helping Araya Calaveras and her people with a hunt. You don’t actually need to be there—the Calaveras are more than capable of handling a routine hunt like this one on their own—but you’d talked to Scott, and Derek, and Noah, and you’d all agreed that closer alliances with the established hunting families could only work to your benefit. So, here you are.

Still, you spend the night in your motel room methodically cleaning your guns, your phone propped up on the bed with a pillow behind it so that the camera can see you, and you can see the screen, filled corner to corner with the McCall living room, and Melissa putting around within it.

The time ticking away in the corner of the screen shows that you’ve been on this call for almost two hours. During that time you’ve cleaned two glocks and a snub-nosed rifle, and Melissa has filled out a crossword from the _Beacon Hills Journal,_ occasionally calling out a clue to request your help on it. It makes you feel young again—like two teenagers spending hours on the phone talking about nothing, because there’s nothing to talk about, and that’s a _good_ thing—except that you’d never been this young; not in this specific way. If Melissa had or if she feels the same thing she doesn’t say. Every now and then you have to ask her to repeat herself, affectionately exasperated, as she wanders too far away from the microphone or turns her face to the side just as she goes to respond.

Eventually you get a message notification, and have to spend a few seconds fiddling with your phone to pull it up. Melissa notices the wild swinging of your camera feed and her voice floats through the speakers. “Something up?”

“Text,” you answer. The number is unlisted, but the message is clear enough: an address, and a time.

“Who from?” Melissa asks absently, not actually invested but following that sort of reflexive conversational script people just seem to carry around with them, hardwired into their brains. 

You don’t actually know, but you have your suspicions. “Contact,” you answer, surprising yourself with the fact that you’d very nearly said _friend_.

Melissa frowns, and actually makes the effort to come back over to her tablet so that she can see you. You’d switched back over from the text to your video app so you can see her, too. She asks, “Problem?” sounding wary, like she’s prepared to be alarmed if she has to be but would really prefer not to be. 

You grin, and the lines between her brow smooth out as she correctly interprets your ease. “Unlikely,” you say, making sure your tone of voice says _no_ , “but I guess I should go find out.”

The diner the address leads you to is old, a little rundown but in that well-used—well- _loved_ —kind of way. When you walk in there’s an honest-to-god little bell that jangles, cheery and bronze-bright. A waitress—similar in mold to the one in the tiny port-side in Washington—welcomes you, and waves you on with a friendly smile when you tell her you’re meeting someone. 

Theo is sitting in a booth by himself when you spot him, his fingers resting lightly against a white ceramic mug—the edges of it chipped here and there—and his eyes on the coffee inside. He looks up when you slide into the bench seat across him. 

You spend a few seconds just studying him, and then you nod towards his mug. “How’s the coffee?” You wonder.

Theo’s lips twitch. “Caustic,” he answers, and then that twitch of his lips becomes an actual smile as you flag down the waitress to order some. Even over the scent of the bitter brew she pours you, you can practically taste salt on your tongue, the air inside the diner heavy with it from the sea just a few blocks away. 

_What are you doing here?_ You could ask, but you already know the answer. There’s a port in this town, too, smaller and a necessary cousin to the massive one just a few dozen miles up the coast in LA. 

And in LA, there are other things. Specifically, there is _one_ thing.

And it comes blowing through the diner’s door shortly after, wind-tousled and already grinning. Theo had sat down facing the door—old habits, you assume—and so you can’t see what he’s looking at as the bronze bell chimes, but you can see the effect it has: Theo’s entire face softens. He smiles, soft-edged and slow.

Liam just tosses the jacket he’d just shed over Theo’s lap when he makes it to the booth, the clump of it landing in the corner of the bench seat, and then he leans down and presses his mouth to Theo’s, right there in front of you and god and the work-roughened faces of the diner’s patrons and everybody. He braces one hand on the table as he does it, and one hand on the back of Theo’s neck, and it’s only as he’s pulling back and bumping his hip into Theo’s arm to get him to scoot over that you see the black veins flowing up his wrist, and disappearing by his elbow.

Theo slides over without protest, and he also takes a sip of his coffee right after. When his throat works as he swallows, it’s smooth. 

He doesn’t gag.

He _does_ look at you, and sees you seeing how effortless the motion is. His eyes are knowing, the corner of one side of his mouth curved. You smirk back, just as small. Acknowledging.

“So,” you say, once Liam’s settled. The bench seat is sizable but he’s pressed thigh-to-thigh and shoulder-to-shoulder with Theo, and that’s as much a message as Theo’s smooth-working throat. You pick up the plastic-backed menu that the waitress had set before you, and peruse it with a purposefully-comedic level of concentration, furrowed brow and everything. “Any recommendations?”

Across from you, Liam loses a level of tension that he probably hadn’t realized he’d been carrying. When he slumps his foot momentarily brushes yours, before he moves it again. You don’t need to see it to guess that he’d probably just hooked it around Theo’s; an anchor-point.

“They’ve got this pepper jack burger with caramelized onions that’s _amazing,_ ” Liam opines, then, dreamy: “And their fries. _God,_ their fries.”

You make a face, considering. But then you look up, over the top of your menu, because Theo’s saucer _clinks_ delicately as he sets his coffee mug back down on top of it. 

“True,” he agrees, but he meets _your_ eyes. “But me? I’ve kind of got a thing for the waffles.”

You grin. You laugh, Liam annoyed and poking at Theo, glaring at you for an explanation. 

You order the waffles.

**Author's Note:**

> All feedback loved! If you liked, please consider a comment or a [reblog](https://eneiryu.tumblr.com/post/638951113116303361/trade-wind-divination-of-our-coastline-cartography)!


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